“In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some of them certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see, they’re so scattered; you’ll never get the public to look at them. Now, if you’d taken a definite subject, such as ‘London by Night,’ or ‘The Crystal Palace in the Spring,’ and made a regular series, the public would have known at once what they were looking at. I can’t lay too much stress upon that. All the men who are making great names in art, like Crum Stone or Bleeder, are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by specializing and putting their works all in the same pigeonhole, so that the public know at once where to go. And this stands to reason, for if a man’s a collector he doesn’t want people to smell at the canvas to find out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be able to say at once, ‘A capital Forsyte!’ It is all the more important for you to be careful to choose a subject that they can lay hold of on the spot, since there’s no very marked originality in your style.”

Young Jolyon, standing by the little piano, where a bowl of dried rose leaves, the only produce of the garden, was deposited on a bit of faded damask, listened with his dim smile.

Turning to his wife, who was looking at the speaker with an angry expression on her thin face, he said:

“You see, dear?”

“I do not ,” she answered in her staccato voice, that still had a little foreign accent; “your style has originality.”

The critic looked at her, smiled deferentially, and said no more. Like everyone else, he knew their history.

The words bore good fruit with young Jolyon; they were contrary to all that he believed in, to all that he theoretically held good in his art, but some strange, deep instinct moved him against his will to turn them to profit.