The Banks of Colne - The Nursery Author:Eden Phillpotts Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE STUDIO Theke are two orders of human beings who lack power of self-expression: those who neither know the need nor feel it — the bulk of ma... more »nkind — and those who are aware of the lack and in consequence suffer. To these latter belonged Peter Mistley. He was not, however, to be pitied as much as he pitied himself, for while his tongue was slow, his hand was swift. He possessed his art, and through that medium made himself known and valued. As an architectural gardener he had won no small fame, and though he worked anonymously for another and his achievements went to the credit of the firm of Ambrose, yet he was well known in horticultural circles, and his opinions commanded respect beyond his own country. Art sweetened his life and filled it, yet he escaped not the common lot of a discontented mind, and his grievance with fate centred in this: that people preferred his art to himself. His brusque manner alone accounted for it; but he felt himself not really ungracious and, though now accustomed to the experience, continued to regret the coldness of mankind. People were agreeable and amiable while he worked for them; but his accomplishments made no friends. When a garden was finished, those for whom he made it forgot the artist and generally took the applause to their credit. As a youth he had been morbid and rather absurd in his exactions; now he was thirty-two and growing more sensible. He began to perceive his own limitations with greater patience and concede a charm to others which was beyond his power to imitate. But he grew less self-conscious, and cultivated the doing of kind acts and the saying of kind words. He suffered much at the missing of many opportunities, but that he saw the opportunities argued his heart; that he missed them only proved the o...« less