Tlie Real Charlotte, 89 



He was a young man of a reflective turn, and had artistic 

 aspirations which, had he been of a hardier nature, would 

 probably have taken him further than photography. But 

 Christopher's temperament held one or two things unusual 

 in the amateur. He had the saving, or perhaps fatal power 

 of seeing his own handiwork with as unflattering an eye as 

 he saw other people's. He had no confidence in anything 

 about himself except his critical abiHty, and as he did not 

 satisfy that, his tentative essays in painting died an early 

 death. It was the same with everything else. His fastidi- 

 ous dislike of doing a thing indifferently was probably a 

 form of conceit, and though it was a higher form than the 

 common vanity whose geese are all swans, it brought about 

 in him a kind of deadlock. His relations thought him ex- 

 tremely clever, on the strength of his university career and 

 his intellectual fastidiousness, and he himself was aware 

 that he was clever, and cared very little for the knowledge. 

 Half the people in the world were clever nowadays, he said 

 to himself with indolent irritability, but genius was another 

 affair ; and, having torn up his latest efforts in water-colour 

 and verse, he bought a camera, and betook himself to the 

 more attainable perfection of photography. 



It was delightful to lie here with the delicate cigarette 

 smoke keeping the flies at bay, and the grasshoppers whirring 

 away in the grass, like fairy sewing-machines, and with the 

 soothing knowledge that the others had been through the 

 glade, had presumably done the ruin thoroughly, and were 

 now cutting their boots to pieces on the water-fretted lime- 

 stone rocks as they scrambled round from the shore to the 

 landing-place. This small venerable wood, and the boulders 

 that had lain about the glade through sleepy centuries 

 till the moss had smothered their outlines, brought to 

 Christopher's mind the enchanted country through which 

 King Arthur's knights rode ; and he lay there mouthing to 

 himself fragments of half-remembered verse, and wondering 

 at the chance that had reserved for him this backwater in a 

 day of otherwise dubious enjoyment. He even found him- 

 self piecing together a rhyme or two on his own account ; but, 

 as is often the case, inspiration was paralysed by the over- 

 whelming fulness of the reality ; the fifth line refused to ex- 

 press his idea, and the interruption of lyric emotion caused 



