' I convinced myself for a time, that on the same
journey I saw but what he saw. Certain old women's faces filled me
with horror, faces that are no longer there, or if they are, pass
before me unnoticed: the fat blotched faces, rising above double
chins, of women who have drunk too much beer and eaten too much
meat. In Dublin I had often seen old women walking with erect
heads and gaunt bodies, talking to themselves in loud voices, mad
with drink and poverty, but they were different, they belonged to
romance: Da Vinci has drawn women who looked so and so carried
their bodies.
XIII
I attempted to restore one old friend of my father's to the
practice of his youth, but failed though he, unlike my father, had
not changed his belief. My father brought me to dine with Jack
Nettleship at Wigmore Street, once inventor of imaginative designs
and now a painter of melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a
great deal--too much, I imagine, for so young a man, or may be for
any man--and on the way home my father, who had been plainly
anxious that I should make a good impression, was very angry.
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