This must have painfully
cribbed and confined his free-ranging spirit. We were filled by
reverent sympathy for the trials and deprivations of his past. But at
the period when the members--numbering a dozen, more or less--of our
devoted band trooped up from Chelsea and down from the Hampstead
heights to worship in the studio-library of the Church Street,
Kensington, house, Pogson was lapped in a material well-being
altogether sufficient. He treated us, his youthful friends and
disciples, to very excellent food and drink; partaking of these
himself, moreover, with evident readiness and relish. Those little
"help-yourselves," stand-up suppers in the big, quiet, comfortably
warmed and shaded room revealed in him no ascetic tendency, though, I
hasten to add, no tendency to unbecoming excess. Such hospitality
testified to the soundness of Pogson's existing financial position; as
did his repeated assertions that now, at last--praise heaven--he had
leisure to do worthy and abiding work, work through which he could
freely express his personality, express in terms of art his judgments
upon, and appreciations of, the human scene.
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