"I often wonder,"--the eyes of the Corporal were fixed on the Sharrow--"what made Stanning take up with a chap like me. There was lots of 'em in C company with far more education, but he told me once that I was the same kind of fool that he was and I said that I wished it was so. I suppose he meant that I liked to talk about this old river and the lights on it and the look of it at different times of the year. He knew every yard of the Sharrow between here and Dibley and so did I, but he could see things that I couldn't, and he could remember 'em and he'd a wonderful eye for nature. He wasn't the least bit of a soldier, no more than myself, but he made a first-rate job of it--he was the kind of chap who would make a first-rate job of anything. Our C.O. wanted him to apply for a commission, but he said he couldn't face the responsibility. That was queer, wasn't it, in a man of that sort?--for he was a man, I give you my word." The Corporal plucked another spear of grass and began to chew it pensively. "He had a cottage up at Dibley, that largish white one on the left, standing back from the road, you know the one I mean--the one with the iron gate, and that funny sort of a tower at the end of the garden." Melia said she did know, although she had half forgotten it, but she hadn't been to Dibley since they were first married, and that was a long time ago. "It belonged to Torrington the artist. He lived and died there. Stanning said he was the greatest painter of landscape that ever lived, but nobody knew it while he was alive and he died in poverty. Not that it mattered. Stanning said that money doesn't matter to an artist, but he said that many an artist had been ruined by making it too easy." This dictum of Stanning's sounded odd in the ear of Melia. No one could be ruined by making money too easily, but she had not the heart to contradict his disciple who was still chewing grass and looking up at the sky. "See what I mean, Mother?" "Makes them take to drink and gambling, I suppose." After all, there was that solution. "Stanning meant that if an artist gets money too easy it'll take the edge off his work. He was always afraid that was what was going to happen to himself. In 1913 he made six thousand pounds--think on it, Mother, six thousand pounds in one year painting pictures! He said that was the writing on the wall for him; he said it was as much as Torrington made in all his life and he lived beyond eighty. 'And I'm not fit to tie Torrington's shoelace, Auntie.' I laughed at that, of course, but he was not a man to want butter. 'I mean it, my dear.' If he liked you he had a way of calling you 'my dear,' like one girl does to another. 'Torrington was the only man that ever lived who could handle sunlight. That's the test for a painter. If I touch sunlight I burn holes in the canvas.' Of course, I laughed, but Stanning was a very humble chap when he talked about his own paintings."