‘What time of the day do you call it?’ said a second. ‘Why, afternoon, to be sure,’ cried the first critic; ‘don’t you see the shadows fall to the left hand, and the look in that woman’s eyes? It’s afternoon, or I’m an ass! Did you ever see a woman look like that except in the afternoon?--sleepiest time, I tell you, of the whole day.’ ‘She’s weary of watching, don’t you see?’ said his neighbour. ‘Matter-of-fact soul! But I’d get that light straight if I were you, Suffolk. He’s wrong about the sentiment, but he’s right about the light.’ ‘Give us the chalk here,’ said Constable, who had just come back from Italy; ‘there’s just a touch wanted about the arm, if you don’t mind.’ ‘The colour’s good, my dear fellow,’ said Spyer, who was older than any of them, and a kind of authority in his way, ‘and the sentiment is good. I like that wistful look in her eye. She’s turned off her lover, but she can’t help that gaze after him. Poor thing!--just like women. And I like that saffron robe; but I think you might mend the drawing. I don’t quite see how she’s got her shoulder. It’s not out of joint, is it? You had better send for the surgeon before it goes down to Trafalgar Square.’ All these blasts of criticism poor Suffolk received, _tant bien que mal_, doing his best to seem unmoved. He even suffered the chalk which ‘that beggar, Constable--a tree-painter, by Jove!--a landscape man,’ he said afterwards, with the fervour of indignation, permitted himself to mark the dimpled elbow of his Saxon maiden. The mists of smoke and the laughter that came out of the room from cheery companions who were lost in these mists, and the system of give and take, which made him prescient of the moment when Spyer and Constable too would be at his mercy, as he was now at theirs, made their comments quite bearable, when one word from the ‘Sword’ would have driven the painter frantic. And to do them justice, it was only the pictures which were in the course of painting on which they were critical. Groups now and then would collect before that picture of the English captive boys in the Forum, which the Academy had hung at the roof, and which had come home accordingly unapplauded and unsold, though later;--but I need not anticipate the course of events. Suffolk’s visitors gathered before it, and looked at it with their heads on one side, and pointed out its special qualities to each other, not with the finger, as do the ignorant, but with that peculiar caressing movement of the hand which is common to the craft. ‘What colour! by Jove, that’s a bit of Italian air brought bodily into our fogs;--and the cross light is perfect, sir!’ Spyer said, who had just been so hard on his friend’s drawing. If they found out faults which the uninstructed eye was slow to see, they discovered beauties too; and then gathered round the fire, and fell into twos and threes, and went back to that same talk of the past and the ‘old set,’ in which Laurie had indulged on the previous night.