Meanwhile he had never ceased to work at his art; but, soon tiring of the studios, entirely by himself. He had never been so poor that he could not buy canvas and paint, and really he needed nothing else. So far as I could make out, he painted with great difficulty, and in his unwillingness to accept help from anyone lost much time in finding out for himself the solution of technical problems which preceding generations had already worked out one by one. He was aiming at something, I knew not what, and perhaps he hardly knew himself; and I got again more strongly the impression of a man possessed. He did not seem quite sane. It seemed to me that he would not show his pictures because he was really not interested in them. He lived in a dream, and the reality meant nothing to him. I had the feeling that he worked on a canvas with all the force of his violent personality, oblivious of everything in his effort to get what he saw with the mind’s eye; and then, having finished, not the picture perhaps, for I had an idea that he seldom brought anything to completion, but the passion that fired him, he lost all care for it. He was never satisfied with what he had done; it seemed to him of no consequence compared with the vision that obsessed his mind. “Why don’t you ever send your work to exhibitions?” I asked. “I should have thought you’d like to know what people thought about it.” “Would you?” I cannot describe the unmeasurable contempt he put into the two words. “Don’t you want fame? It’s something that most artists haven’t been indifferent to.” “Children. How can you care for the opinion of the crowd, when you don’t care twopence for the opinion of the individual?” “We’re not all reasonable beings,” I laughed. “Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women.” “Wouldn’t it give you a rather pleasing sensation to think of people you didn’t know and had never seen receiving emotions, subtle and passionate, from the work of your hands? Everyone likes power. I can’t imagine a more wonderful exercise of it than to move the souls of men to pity or terror.” “Melodrama.” “Why do you mind if you paint well or badly?” “I don’t. I only want to paint what I see.” “I wonder if I could write on a desert island, with the certainty that no eyes but mine would ever see what I had written.” Strickland did not speak for a long time, but his eyes shone strangely, as though he saw something that kindled his soul to ecstasy. “Sometimes I’ve thought of an island lost in a boundless sea, where I could live in some hidden valley, among strange trees, in silence. There I think I could find what I want.” He did not express himself quite like this. He used gestures instead of adjectives, and he halted. I have put into my own words what I think he wanted to say. “Looking back on the last five years, do you think it was worth it?” I asked. He looked at me, and I saw that he did not know what I meant. I explained.