After a while Clive comes down without J. J., from the upper regions. He is greatly excited. “Oh, sir,” he says to his father, “you talk about my drawings—you should see J. J.’s! By Jove, that fellow is a genius. They are beautiful, sir. You seem actually to read the Arabian Nights, you know, only in pictures. There is Scheherazade telling the stories, and—what do you call her?—Dinarzade and the Sultan sitting in bed and listening. Such a grim old cove! You see he has cut off ever so many of his wives’ heads. I can’t think where that chap gets his ideas from. I can beat him in drawing horses, I know, and dogs; but I can only draw what I see. Somehow he seems to see things we don’t, don’t you know? Oh, father, I’m determined I’d rather be a painter than anything.” And he falls to drawing horses and dogs at his uncle’s table, round which the elders are seated. “I’ve settled it upstairs with J. J.,” says Clive, working away with his pen. “We shall take a studio together; perhaps we will go abroad together. Won’t that be fun, father?” “My dear Clive,” remarks Mr. Honeyman, with bland dignity, “there are degrees in society which we must respect. You surely cannot think of being a professional artist. Such a profession is very well for your young _protégé;_ but for you——” “What for me?” cries Clive. “We are no such great folks that I know of; and if we were, I say a painter is as good as a lawyer, or a doctor, or even a soldier. In Dr. Johnston’s Life—which my father is always reading—I like to read about Sir Joshua Reynolds best: I think he is the best gentleman of all in the book. My! wouldn’t I like to paint a picture like Lord Heathfield in the National Gallery! _Wouldn’t_ I just! I think I would sooner have done that, than have fought at Gibraltar. And those Three Graces—oh, aren’t they graceful! And that Cardinal Beaufort at Dulwich!—it frightens me so, I daren’t look at it. Wasn’t Reynolds a clipper, that’s all! and wasn’t Rubens a brick! He was an ambassador, and Knight of the Bath; so was Vandyck. And Titian, and Raphael, and Velasquez?—I’ll just trouble you to show me better gentlemen than them, Uncle Charles.” “Far be it from me to say that the pictorial calling is not honourable,” says Uncle Charles; “but as the world goes there are other professions in greater repute; and I should have thought Colonel Newcome’s son——” “He shall follow his own bent,” said the Colonel; “as long as his calling is honest it becomes a gentleman; and if he were to take a fancy to play on the fiddle—actually on the fiddle—I shouldn’t object.”