As I gazed, the signature changed from that of a gnome with luminous eyes who inhabited an inaccessible crag among the rhododendrons to that of a prosperous artist-bourgeois with a silk hat for Sundays.

I have in some small degree the psychological knack, I saw the possibilities of the situation with immense clearness; and I cursed the cheque.
Coincidence is odious, tells on the nerves.

I never felt it more so than a week later, when I read in the 'Pioneer' the announcement of the death of my old friend Fry, Superintendent of the School of Art in Calcutta.
The paragraph in which the journal dismissed poor Fry to his reward was not unkind, but it distinctly implied that the removal of Fry should include the removal of his ideas and methods, and the substitution of something rather more up to date.

It remarked that the Bengali student had been pinned down long enough to drawing plaster casts, and declared that something should be done to awake within him the creative idea.

I remember the phrase, it seemed so directly to suggest that the person to awake it should be Ingersoll Armour.
I turned the matter over in my mind; indeed, for the best part of an hour my brain revolved with little else.