Rose’s father was a landscape painter of rather more than independent means: sufficient at any rate to make it possible for him to seek loveliness in no matter how distant a land. He had sketches which he had made all over Europe, in Morocco, in Egypt, in Japan. But France was his favourite hunting ground, partly, I think, because he liked the comments of the French peasants who stood behind his easel better than those of any other critic. Artists, even when they are poor, are enviable men. They live by enjoyment—their work is fun—for even if the unequal struggle to persuade pigments to reproduce nature fills them with despair, they are still occupied with beauty, still seeing only what they want to see, and remote from squalor and sordidness and the ills of life. Theodore Allinson took the fullest advantage of his artistic temperament and his private fortune. The one enabled him to ignore whatever was unpleasing, and the other to fulfil every wandering caprice. It was all in keeping with such a man’s destiny that he should have as a next-door neighbour an ordinary trustworthy fellow like myself, who could be depended upon to keep an eye on his motherless infant when he was absent. Or, for that matter, when he was present too. He would have taken it as a very cruel injustice on the part of the gods if I had moved to any other part of the kingdom—as probably any decently ambitious young man in my position would have done. How he would have raised his clenched fists to Heaven and railed against fate! But, luckily for him, I could eat the lotus too. My lotus-eating, however, would have been only half as delightful if Allinson were not my neighbour and his small daughter my protegée. For he was easy and amusing and full of whimsical fancies, with a very solid foundation of culture beneath all, and his little girl was a continual joy. She had taken to me at once, or at any rate had taken to my watch—watches having always been useful links between infantile patients and their medical men. Mine was a gold repeater, very satisfying to immature gums and surprising and amusing to the ear. I still have it, and sophisticated though the world has grown, and mechanically melodious with gramophone and piano-player, it still chimes for the young with all its old allurement. As Rose developed, the function of the repeater as a mediator decreased in importance, and she and I took to more ordinary means of communicating our sympathy; but the watch laid the foundations and laid them truly. * * * * *