In that month of June, for the first time in his deliberately active career, Neville experienced a disinclination to paint.

And when he realised that it was disinclination, it appalled him.

Something--he didn't understand what--had suddenly left him satiated--and with all the uneasiness and discontent of satiation he forced matters until he could force no further.
He had commissions, several, and valuable; and let them lie.

For the first time in all his life the blank canvas of an unexecuted commission left him untempted, unresponsive, weary.
He had, also, his portrait of Valerie to continue.

He continued it mentally, at intervals; but for several days, now, he had not laid a brush to it.
"It's funny," he said to Querida, going out on the train to his sister's country home one delicious morning--"it's confoundedly odd that I should turn lazy in my old age.