It wasn’t the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him--it was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the discrepancy between a man’s wants and his power to gratify them. Neave’s taste was too exquisite for his means--was like some strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn’t satisfy. “Don’t you know those little glittering lizards that die if they’re not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste’s like that, with one important difference--if it doesn’t get its fly, it simply turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn’t die, my taste--worse luck! It gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me--that’s all.” That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations--as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses--only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable--that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing--such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say--a hundred elements of perfection, a hundred _reasons why_, imperceptible, inexplicable even, to the average “artistic” sense; he had reached this point by a long austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it’s a poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually wins... You see, the worst of Neave’s state was the fact of his not being a mere collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency. The whole thing was blent in him with poetry--his imagination had romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the Middle Ages turned passion into love. And yet his could never be the abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: “This or that object is really mine because I’m capable of appreciating it.” Neave _wanted_ what he appreciated--wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with his imagination.