The majority of the young men went away after an hour’s talk and smoke unlimited; but Laurie was one of those who remained and went down to supper, along with Spyer and Constable, to the back room down-stairs, which was the little dining-room. Mrs. Suffolk was very careful to keep the folding-doors shut, and to make two rooms, though it certainly would have been larger and might have been more comfortable had they been thrown into one. It was Mrs. Spyer who was her companion that evening, who was older than she, and commented a little sharply on this poor little bit of pretension, as Laurie walked part of the way home with the pair. ‘I like nice dining and drawing-rooms as well as any one,’ Mrs. Spyer said, ‘but if I were Helen, I would be comfortable, and never mind.’ ‘All the same she is a good little woman,’ her husband had said, irrelevantly;--for, to be sure, nobody doubted that she was a good little woman. They had cold beef and celery and cheese on the table, and refreshed themselves with copious draughts of beer. I do not say it was a very refined conclusion to the evening, but I think Laurie was better amused and more interested than after many a fine party. He walked home with Spyer, talking of Suffolk’s picture, and the injustice that had been done him, _jettant feu et flamme_, as they mentioned the Academy, yet hoping that band of tyrants could not be so foolish two years running. ‘The thing is, to have him written up in the papers,’ Spyer said; ‘a fellow of his talent cannot be long kept in the background; but if the papers were to take him up, it would shorten his probation.’ ‘I hate the papers,’ said Mrs. Spyer. ‘Why don’t we have private patrons, as we used to have, and never mind the public? To think of a wretched newspaper deciding a man’s fate! I would not give in to it for a day.’
‘But we must give in to it, or else be left behind in the race,’ said her husband. And Laurie thought more and more, as he listened to all this talk, of the influence he himself might exercise at the club and elsewhere upon Slasher and the ‘Sword.’
The first grand question to be decided, when Laurie settled in Charlotte Street, was what his first picture was to be. It is true that Mr. Welby, and even the padrona, who was so much more hopeful, were all for mere study and life-schools, and the lectures at the Academy, and anatomical demonstrations, and other disagreeable things, which Laurie, always amiable, gave in to, to please them, not doubting of the advantage of the studies in question. But still his anatomy, and his notes, and studies from the life, however careful, were only means to an end; and there was no reason why the end itself should not be pursued at the same time,--or at least so he thought. He had painted pictures before now as a mere amateur, and in that capacity had even,--once,--obtained a nook in the Academy’s exhibition; and why he should now suspend his chief work, and, having become a professional painter, paint no longer, was what Laurie could not perceive. He was not the man to exhibit his study of the Norman fisherwoman or Italian peasant who might chance to be posing at the school, as some of the Clipstone Street fellows did. His work there, of course, would help him in his real work at home; but to spend his entire time in preparation for work, and do nothing, seemed to Laurie plain idiocy. ‘I painted nothing for three years on end when I was like you,’ old Welby said. ‘You require to be a painter, sir, before you can paint a picture; and it is hard enough work to make yourself a painter. If I were in your place I’d never look at a canvas bigger than that for at least a year.’