"Anybody can see beauty in what are _called_ beautiful things--light, and colour, and grace.

But it takes an artist to see beauty in a muddy road, and dripping branches, and drenching rain.

How people cursed and grumbled on that rainy day we had last week; it made me sick to hear them.

Now I saw the beauty _under_ the ugliness of it all--the wonderful soft greys and browns, the tiny glints of silver between the leaves, the flashes of pearl and orpiment behind the shifting clouds.

Do you know, I even see beauty in this wooden leg of mine, great beauty, though everybody else thinks it perfectly hideous! So that is why I hope I am not wrong in imagining that perhaps I may, really, be in some sense an artist." For a moment St Aubyn did not speak.