"Best Brussels net, at one-and-elevenpence-halfpenny per yard," muttered Cyril, stealing a glance full of mischief at Jean.
For one moment Jean's lips quivered a response; then she drew up her head, offended. In anybody else such self-complacent trifling would have aroused her scorn: but Oswald might say or do what he willed: and that Cyril should laugh at Oswald was intolerable. Jean looked severe; and Cyril assumed an air of apology, not nearly so abject as it would have been fifteen months earlier.
"The true test of painting! Of art!" declaimed Oswald, not listening to other people's remarks. "Must be true to life. Creatures in impossible attitudes, wearing impossible dresses, doing impossible things—that's not art, you know. It's bosh. Something true to life is the thing. Flowers you want to pick up! A curtain you try to pull aside! A veil you'd like to lift! That's art! . . . No. 157. Now, here's something worth looking at again. No symbolical clap-trap, but the real thing. 'A landscape!' Now, these flowers on the bank—positively, one can count their leaves."
Their petals, he meant.
"Immense improvement on the old smudge and scratch style. Anything went down with people in those days. A blue patch stood for e sky, and a green blur did duty for a forest."
"I'm afraid a blue patch often does stand for the sky in London!" suggested Cyril, under his breath. "And a green blur does duty for a forest in my eyes—if the forest is far enough."
"Oswald does not mean that," promptly spoke up the devoted sister in his defence.
"Well—some question of distance is involved, certainly," admitted Cyril. "But if a forest, half-a-mile off, isn't a green blur, one can't on the other hand count its leaves. And a botanist can hardly count the stamens of a flower growing on a bank ten yards away."
"Not one person in a hundred knows a good picture when he sees it," declared Oswald. "Nature is the true test. What is true to Nature is true to Art. I'd sooner have a pair of tongs, with the firelight upon them, done well, than any number of fantastic things that mean, nobody knows what."
"I would have" settled the question, of course, permanently.