Your ideal artist is above envy and above despair. Haydon committed suicide because he couldn't pay his butcher and baker, not because his big canvases were unsuccessful. He would have gone on painting, and hoping against hope, if he could have afforded to live; it was the sordid every-day necessity that vanquished him. You will never be a great painter, Foley, while you think of your own disappointments, your own failures: you must learn to merge your identity into the mighty abstraction. If they refuse your picture at the Academy to-day, go home and begin a better to-morrow; and before the month is out you will rejoice that your rejected canvas was unhung. The story of Lot's wife has a moral for painters. Never look back. What are the failures of the past and the present? A little wasted canvas, a few tubes of colour more or less; and it is across the failures of the present that brave men march to the triumphs of the future. What hot-headed fellows the young men of the present day are! I was five and thirty before I got a decent price for a picture; and here is a lad of twenty-seven talking of going out to India to die, because he is not acknowledged as the new Turner." William Crawford had been the kindly friend and adviser of many young painters; but it was not often that he spoke as earnestly as he had spoken to Philip Foley to-night. The young man grasped his counsellor's hand with feverish ardour. "You are right," he said. "I am a weak, egotistical fool; and it is of myself I am always thinking, and not of my art. A painter ought to divorce himself from the common weaknesses and to wean himself from the common pleasures of mankind; and yet Rubens was happy with his beautiful young wives, and had his home as well as his painting-room. I gathered some ivy-leaves in his garden last autumn, and, standing in the little pavilion where he used to sit sketching on summer mornings, I thought what a blessed existence it must have been, the sweet home-life in that quaint old city of Antwerp. But it is not in every man to be Rubens, nor is it in every man to win the woman he loves; and--you are right, Mr. Crawford. The painter who wants to be great must forget himself and his own troubles. I dare say there were family jars even in the Antwerp household, and that glorious Peter Paul has gone to his work with a sore heart on some of those bright summer mornings." There was a pause, during which both men stood looking out at the starlit garden, thinking of the women they loved. Mrs. Champernowne had promised to "look in" at the Fountains on that special Sunday evening, and had not done so. "It was like her to delude me by a promise, on purpose to disappoint me by breaking it," thought Mr. Crawford bitterly. "Come, Foley," he said at last, "let's hear what you have been doing. I hope you are working honestly."