Life might be thought to have treated him savagely in following up his parents with the hardly less cruel Pauli. He disguised the shock of his discovery on Pauli's death by remarking that he would now save not only £200 a year, but also the cost of those three lunches a week in Clifford's Inn. Yet a nature that opened itself so trustingly, so defencelessly, must have suffered on finding its bounty abused. But in his other friends, in Miss Savage, in his clerk, Alfred Emery Cathie, and in Mr. Festing Jones he had ample compensations. He was a man who at first sight was not readily liked. He was awkward and nervous in the company of strangers, and it is likely that he did not disguise so well as he supposed his grave misgivings that they were either pretentious scoundrels or conceited hypocrites. He was always badly and carelessly dressed; and though his portraits, when one is used to them and can associate them with the best one knows of his mind, become attractive, there can be no denial that his appearance was on the most lenient showing decidedly grotesque, that of a difficult, taciturn, maliciously observant gnome, roughly carved in a hard wood. It took some time and some degree of intuition to penetrate behind this mask. Those who did so were rewarded and rewarded him. Miss Savage, who used to meet him first at Heatherley's art-classes, was not attracted by him for a considerable time. When at last she was, it was by a flash of remarkable intuition. In commenting on one of his books, she writes: I like the cherry-eating scene, too, because it reminded me of your eating cherries when first I knew you. One day when I was going to the gallery, a very hot day, I remember, I met you on the shady side of Berners Street eating cherries out of a basket. Like your Italian friends, you were perfectly silent with content, and you handed the basket to me as I was passing, without saying a word. I pulled out a handful and went on my way rejoicing, without saying a word either. I had not before perceived you to be different from anyone else. It is not certain whether Miss Savage became a Butlerian or whether Butler acquired something of what we consider his characteristic attitude of mind from her. If it was not so, then her spirit leapt at once to answer his as soon as she had perceived the possibility of common interests between them, for her first letters to him are written in his own vein. She entered immediately into his concerns, read all his books in manuscript, criticised them, gave them more praise than they received from anyone else, and abused his enemies with a gusto equal to his. The only trouble between them in their long connection was his gnawing fear that she wanted to marry him. And he did not want to marry anyone, let alone her who was Plain and lame and fat and short, Forty and overkind.