To water there was no death; it was eternally young, and the ages brought no abatement of its vigour. Then in the bright twilight of the sun just set he dressed and walked back to the house to find that he had been nearly an hour gone, and that it was close on dinner-time. During the earlier part, anyhow, of that meal Evelyn showed no return of his disquietude, but, as was his wont, poured out floods of surprising stuff. He talked shop quite unashamed, and this evening the drawbacks of an artist's life supplied his text. "Yes, everyone is for ever insisting," he said, "that the artist's life is its own reward, because his work is creative; but there are times when I would sooner be the man who puts bristles in toothbrushes. Those folk don't allow for the days when you sit in front of a blank canvas, or a canvas half-finished, and look at it in an absolute stupor of helplessness. I suppose they would say 'Go on, put down what you see,' and they are so wooden-headed as not to realise that on such occasions, unfortunately numerous, one doesn't see anything, and one couldn't put it down if one did. There is a blank wall in front of one. And it is then I say with Mr. Micawber, 'No one is without a friend who is possessed of shaving materials'--yet I don't kill myself. Oh, hang it, here we are talking about death again! Give me some more fish." Merivale performed this hospitable duty. "Ah, but what do you expect?" he asked. "Surely you can't think it's possible that a man can live all the time in the full blaze of imaginative vision? You might as well expect him to run at full speed from the day he was born to the day of his--well, all the time, as you dislike the word." Evelyn drummed the table with his fingers. "But it's just that I want," he cried. "Whose fault is it that I can't do what I feel is inside me all the time? If I have what you call the imaginative vision at all, who has got any business to put a cap like the cap of a camera lens over it, so that I can see nothing whatever? Oh, the pity of it! Sitters, too! Sitters can be so antipathetic that I feel when I look at them that the imaginative vision is oozing out of me, like sawdust when you clip a doll's leg, and that in another moment I shall be just a heap of collapsed rags on the floor, with a silly waxen head and shoulders on the top. If only people would come to me to paint their caricatures I could do some rippers. The next woman I've got to paint when these two are finished is a pink young thing of sixty, with a face that has exactly the expression of a pansy. Lord! Lord!"