"I quite believe him, and wonder and admire, and his face beams with honest satisfaction—and this is the man who wrote La quatrième Dimension!
"Then he tells me some very funny French school-boy stories; he delights in my hearty laughter; they are capital stories, but I had heard them all before—when I was at school.
"'And now, M. Josselin,' I say, 'à propos of that last story you've just told me; in the Trépassées de François Villon you have omitted "la très‑sage Héloïse" altogether.'
"'Oh, have I? How stupid of me!—Abélard and all that! Ah well—there's plenty of time—nous allons arranger tout ça! All that sort of thing comes to me in the night, you know, when I'm half asleep in bed—a—a—I mean after lunch in the afternoon, when I take my siesta.'
"Then he leads me into his studio and shows me pencil studies from the life, things of ineffable beauty of form and expression—things that haunt the memory.
"'Show me a study for Déjanire,' I say.
"'Oh! I'll draw Déjanire for you,' and he takes a soft pencil and a piece of smooth card‑board, and in five minutes draws me an outline of a naked woman on a centaur's back, a creature of touching beauty no other hand in the world could produce—so aristocratically delicately English and of to‑day—so severely, so nobly and classically Greek. C'est la chasteté même—mais ce n'est pas Déjanire!
"He gives me this sketch, which I rechristen Godiva, and value as I value few things I possess.
"Then he shows me pencil studies of children's heads, from nature, and I exclaim:
"'O Heaven, what a dream of childhood! Childhood is never so beautiful as that.'