Within a fortnight I was surprised and a little irritated to receive from Armour the amount of my loan in full. It was not in accordance with my preconceived idea of him that he should return it at all. I had arranged in my own mind that he should be governed by the most honest impulses and the most approved intentions up to the point of departure, but that he should never find it quite convenient to pay, and that in order to effect his final shipment to other shores I should be compelled to lend him some more money. In the far future, when he should be famous and I an obscure pauper on pension, my generous imagination permitted me to see the loan repaid; but not till then. These are perhaps stereotyped and conventional lines to conceive him on, but I hardly think that anybody who has followed my little account to this point will think them unjustifiable. I looked at his cheque with disgust. That a man turns out better than you expected is no reason why you such not be annoyed that your conception of him is shattered. You may be gratified on general grounds, but distinctly put out on personal ones, especially when your conception pointed to his inevitable removal. That was the way I felt. The cheque stood for so much more than its money value. It stood for a possible, nay, a probable capacity in Armour to take his place in the stable body of society, to recognize and make demands, to become a taxpayer, a churchgoer, a householder, a husband. As I gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays. I have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque. Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves. I never felt it more so than a week later, when I read in the ‘Pioneer’ the announcement of the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta. The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the substitution of something rather more up to date. It remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea. I remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.