“One infuses a bit of oneself in a good portrait.” 

Even if it were only the black kitten Merveille, in a beam of sunlight, and his shadow, quick India-ink shifting across the sunlit floor.

Basil smiled, and I watched the play of muscle and tendon in his hands as he absently twirled the head of his walking-stick. Basil had a strange way about him, man-about-town in his dress, until he got to the country, or the studio. Then there was quite a bit of the rumpled workman about him, a distant absent-mindedness, though I heard the grownups say that his society clients had the favor of his presence in respectable dress. But alone, in the country…

Among those sketches, the ones not sold, is a brief charcoal study of my nine-year-old self, notebook in hand, stalking Merveille as he stalked something invisible in the beam of sunlight.