  He was renting the flat furnished: of all the objects that encumbered it none were his own except the photograph frame, the Cupids, and the books.
    "Damn, damn, damnation!" he murmured, together with such other words as he had learnt from older men.  Then he raised his hand to his forehead and said, "Oh, damn it all--" which meant something different.  He pulled himself together.  He drank a little tea, black and silent, that still survived upon an upper shelf.  He swallowed some dusty crumbs of cake.  Then he went back to the sitting-room, settled himself anew, and began to read a volume of Ruskin.
    "Seven miles to the north of Venice--"
    How perfectly the famous chapter opens!  How supreme its command of admonition and of poetry!  The rich man is speaking to us from his gondola.
    "Seven miles to the north of Venice the banks of sand which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea."
    Leonard was trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the greatest master of English Prose.  He read forward steadily, occasionally making a few notes.
    "Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the shafts enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this church--its luminousness."
    Was there anything to be learnt from this fine sentence?  Could he adapt it to the needs of daily life?  Could he introduce it, with modifications, when he next wrote a letter to his brother, the lay-reader?  For example--
    "Let us consider a little each of these characters in succession, and first (for of the absence of ventilation enough has been said already), what is very peculiar to this flat--its obscurity. "
    Something told him that the modifications would not do; and that something, had he known it, was the spirit of English Prose.  "My flat is dark as well as stuffy." Those were the words for him.
    And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life.  For it was the voice of one who had never
