suppose it is easier to disown one’s decencies when one represents them as something grotesque in a black suit and steeple-hat), “but considering the way you behaved to Harrison, I think it’s rather thick to go and push your friends on to him. What you do is your own business” (looking back on it, I seem to have extracted a great deal of satisfaction from this original thought), “but it’s rather different for me.”
“Punk!” said Lathom. “That’s all absolutely over. Finished. Washed out. It’s you who keep on digging it up again. Can’t you forget it and come down and help me out with old Harrison?”
“Why so keen?”
“Oh, I’m not particularly keen. I thought you’d like it, that’s all. It doesn’t matter. What are you doing this afternoon? B.M. again?”
I said, no; I avoided the Reading Room on Saturday afternoons, because it was so crowded, and asked him about his work.
He talked about it a little, in the same vague way as before, saying how difficult it was to settle to anything, and displaying some irritability with his sitters of the moment. His triumph at the Academy had made him fashionable, and fashionable women were all alike, it seemed; small-minded and featureless. One might as well paint masks. All of which I had heard so often from other painters that I put Lathom down as already spoilt.
I suggested that he should stay up in town and do a show with me, but he said he was fed up with shows. He had only come up to see his agent, and was catching the 4:30. Why didn’t I change my mind and come with him?
It ended in my changing my mind, and going. I hardly know why, except that I was only six months married and my wife was away, which, to the well-balanced mind, is no good reason for idle behaviour.