Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

[53] CAPITULUM VII Only for one short period, resumed the Archbishop, no whit exhausted by his previous ef- forts, did I turn from the clerical career which the Q...n’s kindness opened to me. But the restric- tions of the training were at first as irksome to me as they were to Fra Lippo Lippi in Browning’s im- mortal poem, and Art seemed a halfway house. Suiting the action to the thought, I soon found my- self in Paris, and rooms in a dirty little basement in the Montparnasse Quarter. My next-door neighbours were photographers, one, by name L..s, calling himself an artist, and his partner H...s, pluming himself upon his business capacity. L..s was the son of a charlatan parson once well known in Eng- land as a mountebank, while his mother, disgusted that he was a boy, brought him up as a girl, as far as she possibly could. He even slept with her till he was eighteen : and we may guess the result. H...s was a snivelling shit. L..s wore long hair, never washed and rarely shaved. His pictures were beneath criticism, and his manners — Mean little skunks, the slimy pair of them ! Now in an attic in the same building lived S...y B.....s, the common road of the quarter : an illustra- tion of Euclid’s position that the Hole is greater than its Quarter. This was a dirty split-arse me- chanic with nigger blood peeping through her low- caste white parentage. She smoked an inordinate number of cigarettes per diem, and her teeth and breath told the tale. She opened her skinny legs to anything in the shape of a tent-peg that she could