Kilner began to tell him about painting and painters, about Rembrandt and Van Eyck and Cranach, happy Cranach who could paint women without being either sensual or sentimental, and Dürer and Holbein and della Francesca, and how he himself, the son of a mason in Buckinghamshire, had always painted, at first without taste and without purpose, from sheer delight in objects, their form and their color, and how little by little he had learned to see the beauty shining through them and to wish to have that beauty also shining through his pictures and drawings. And how he had come to London to learn his art, financed by rich people near his home; and how he had assumed that every man who touched brush and paint had also desired to render the shining beauty that used all things for its dwelling-place; and how incidentally he had suffered from arrogance and blown vanity, though never losing sight of his one object; and how he had been taught a certain kind of drawing, to be accurate in imitation, and then again accurate and again accurate; and how he had quarreled with those of his teachers who had wished him not to use the power of accuracy they taught him, but to regard it as in itself an end; quarreled with his fellow-students, with his patrons, with his family, with exhibiting societies, with--apparently--everybody, because he could not learn to keep his opinions to himself or conceive that men who painted vilely with constant sacrifice of beauty to their desire to please, did so because that was how they saw things and how they liked things and loved them so far as they could love at all. And he told René of many love affairs he had had, some casual, some unhappy and desperate, some light-hearted and gay, and one ecstatic though it had lasted only for five weeks in spring. He described with a vivid power how he and she lay in the grass in Richmond Park and the soft air above them was alive with light, quivering up to the blue where the clouds swam and slowly faded out of form and being and other clouds came; and near them was an almond-tree in blossom, and above them shone the gummy buds of the beeches; crisp to the touch was the grass, moist and cool was the earth. And he touched her white arm and she trembled. He trembled too. And she turned her face toward him with a sweet trouble and wonder in her eyes and they kissed. "That ended in tears, my tears and hers. I was too coarse for her, I think; too violent. She was very delicate and beautiful." After a long silence, René said: "I have had nothing in my life but foolishness." "There's no harm in that," said Kilner. "It's bitterness that kills. When shall I see you again?" "Do you want to?" René was startled into asking. "Of course. I don't let a friend slip when I've found one." And gladly René said: "A friend. I begin work to-morrow at old Martin's."