There is but one thing to do--to help with a little money if you can
manage it, and then try hard to forget. Yes, I am certain that I should
never paint again if I saw much of those hopeless lives that have no
remedy. I know of such a dear lad about my Phil's age who has felt this
so sharply that he has given his happy, lucky, petted life to give
himself wholly to share their squalor and unlovely lives--doing all he
can, of evenings when his work is over, to amuse such as have the heart
to be amused, reading to them and telling them about histories and what
not--anything he knows that can entertain them. And this he has daily
done for about a year, and if he carries it on for his life time he
shall have such a nimbus that he will look top-heavy with it.
"No, you would always have been lovely and made some beauty about you if
you had been born there--but I should have got drunk and beaten my
family and been altogether horrible! When everything goes just as I
like, and painting prospers a bit, and the air is warm and friends well
and everything perfectly comfortable, I can just manage to behave
decently, and a spoilt fool I am--that's the truth. But wherever you
were, some garden would grow.
"Yes, I know Winchelsea and Rye and Lynn and Hythe--all bonny places,
and Hythe has a church it may be proud of.
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