"You're all right. What are you doing here?"
"Art, my son—sculpture! And incidentally" He hesitated. "I ply a trade. Will you hand me that pipe and those smoking things? So! You can't make coffee, eh? Well, try your hand. Cast down this screen—no—fold it up and so well go into the other room. I'll keep in bed all the same. The fire's a gas stove. Yes. Don't make it bang too loud as you light it—I can't stand it this morning. You won't smoke? . . . Well, it does me good to see you again, Ponderevo. Tell me what you're doing, and how you're getting on."
He directed me in the service of his simple hospitality, and presently I came back to his bed and sat down and smiled at him there, smoking comfortably with his hands under his head, surveying me.
"How's Life's Morning, Ponderevo? By Jove, it must be nearly six years since we met! We've got moustaches. We've fleshed ourselves a bit, eh? And you?"
I felt a pipe was becoming after all, and that lit, I gave him a favourable sketch of my career.
"Science! And you've worked like that! While I've been potting round doing odd jobs for stonemasons and people, and trying to get to sculpture. I've a sort of feeling that the chisel I began with painting, Ponderevo, and found I was colour-blind, colour-blind enough to stop it. I've drawn about and thought about—thought more particularly. I give myself three days a week as an art student, and the rest of the time—I've a sort of trade that keeps me. And we're still in the beginning of things, young men starting. Do you remember the old times at Goudhurst, our doll's-house island, the Retreat of the Ten
