At dinner, Tommy, inspired by more than three-fourths of the grocer’s best bottle of champagne talked glowingly of his prospects in the event of his uncle’s craziness not being a transitory disorder. After all, the world was his oyster, and he knew the trick of opening it. Most people bungled, and jabbed their fingers through trying to prize it open at the wrong end. The wise man, said he, in the tone of an infant Solon, was he who not only made a mock of misfortune, but bent it to his own use as an instrument for the attainment of happiness. When challenged, he confessed that he got this gem of sapience out of a book. But it was jolly true, wasn’t it? Really, he was looking forward to poverty. He was sick of silk hats and patent leather boots and the young women he met at tea-parties. Nature beat the lot. Nature for him. Thoreau—“The boy’s going as cracked as his uncle!” cried Clementina—Thoreau, he insisted, had found out the truth. He would give up his studio, take a labourer’s cottage in the country at two shillings a week, live on lentils, paint immortal though perhaps not instantaneously remunerative landscapes by day and do all sorts of things with his pencil for the sake of a livelihood by night. He knew of a beautiful cottage, two rooms and a kitchen, near Hagbourne, in Berkshire. The place was a forest of cherry-trees. Nothing more breathlessly beautiful on the earth than the whole of a countryside quivering with cherry-blossom—except the same countryside when it was a purple mist of cherries. Geoffrey King had the cottage last summer. There was a bit of a garden which he could cultivate—cherry-trees in it, of course; also flowers and vegetables. He would supply Clementina with pansies and potatoes all the year round. There was a pig-sty, too—useful in case he wanted to run a pig. When Clementina was tired of London, she could come to the cottage and he would sleep in the pig-sty. For the second time that day she asked: “What will you want an old frump like me in the house for?” “To look at my pictures,” said Tommy. Clementina sniffed. “I thought as much,” she said. “Really, the callous selfishness of old age is saint-like altruism compared with the fresh, spontaneous egotism of youth.” Tommy, accustomed to her sharp sayings, only laughed boyishly. How was he to guess the history of the parrot-tulips? He was mildly surprised, however, when she decided to spend the evening, not in the studio, but in the stiff, Sheraton drawing-room. He protested. It was so much jollier in the studio. She asked why. “This place has no character, no personality. It looks like a show drawing-room in a furniture dealer’s window. It has nothing to do with you. It means nothing.” “That’s just why I want to sit in it,” said Clementina. “You can go to the studio, if you like.” “That wouldn’t be polite,” said Tommy.