The arrival of a twinkling-eyed caricaturist, joyously greeted by all as “Jimmy,” dispelled the last flavors of the mortuary. “Aren’t you in China?” everybody asked. Jimmy explained he had thrown up the commission, but was off to the West Indies next month, though he expected to find himself in Paris instead. He was a genius, with an infinite capacity for taking pains and making friends, and, being forced to rise in the small hours to get through his work before the countless callers arrived to distract him, was popularly supposed to be an idle scapegrace, who produced sketches as rapidly and copiously as the conjurer produces oranges from his coat-sleeve. Matt’s breath was almost taken away in a rush of reverence and rapture at the unexpected privilege of seeing him; for, despite his own craving for the Sublime and the Beautiful, Jimmy Raven’s sketches of low London life had for him a magnetic appeal whose strength surprised himself. Sometimes he fancied it was the humor and the fun that held him, as being the qualities in which he himself was most deficient; sometimes it flashed upon him obscurely--as in a light thrown through a fog--that Jimmy Raven was teaching him to see the spectacle of life more deeply and truthfully through the medium of his humorous vision; at such instants he almost thought one of Jimmy’s loafers worth a whole Academy of poetic myths, but he suppressed the suspicion as absurd and perturbing to his own ideals and vision, telling himself it was only the truth and subtlety of the draughtsmanship that he admired. He listened to him now as eagerly and deferentially as to Cornpepper, his eyes fixed mainly on these two famous faces, as if to seize the secret of their gifts in some contour of nose or chin; but he had ample curiosity and respect to spend even on the other men, though below all his real modesty and diffidence was a curious bed-rock of self-conscious strength, as of a talent that might hope one day to be recognized even of these.
But there was little art-talk to be got out of Jimmy. Having likewise said “when,” he launched into an account of an East End girl he had sketched that morning in the Park, and quoted her idea of a coster gentleman. “My brother’s a toff,” he had overheard her boasting. “He wears three rows of buttons down his trousers, and sixteen wentilation ’oles in ’is ’at.” “And who do you think I saw in the Park?” he went on. “Egyptian Bill.”