Mr. Albemarle produced the password. “Very strongly put,” he said.
“I have always felt that myself,” said Mr. Clew. “El Greco, for example....”
“Good morning, what about El Greco?” said a voice, all in one breath. The thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr. Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience. Mr. Mallard wrote every week in the Hebdomadal Digest. He had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful. The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler. All others were treated by him with a merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin.
“What about El Greco?” he repeated. He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El Greco.
Mr. Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly; he was afraid of Mr. Mallard. His enthusiasms were no match for Mr. Mallard’s erudite and logical disgusts. “I was merely quoting him as an example,” he said.
“An example, I hope, of incompetent drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical subject-matter.” Mr. Mallard showed his old ivory teeth in a menacing smile. “Those are the only things which El Greco’s work exemplifies.”
Mr. Clew gave a nervous little laugh. “What do you think of these?” he asked, pointing to Lypiatt’s canvases.
“They look to me very ordinarily bad,” answered Mr. Mallard.
The young assistant listened appalled. In a business like this, how was it possible to make good?
“All the same,” said Mr. Clew courageously, “I like that bowl of roses in the window with the landscape behind. Number twenty-nine.” He looked in the catalogue. “And there’s a really charming little verse about it: