"Matter! Would you like to be painted with your nose behind your ear? My God! It's about as much like me as it is like Lloyd George."
"Likeness is quite a secondary
quality," said Aurelle condescendingly. "The interesting thing is not the individual; it is the type, the synthesis of a whole race or class."
"In the days when I was starving in my native South," said the painter, "I used to paint portraits of tradesmen's wives for a fiver. When I had done, the family assembled for a private view. 'Well,' said the husband, 'it's not so bad; but what about the likeness, eh? You put it in afterwards, I suppose?' 'The likeness?' I indignantly replied. 'The likeness? My dear sir, I am a painter of ideals; I don't paint your wife as she is, I paint her as she ought to be. Your wife? Why, you see her every day—she cannot interest you. But my painting—ah, you never saw anything like my painting!' And the tradesman was convinced, and went about repeating in every café on the Cannebière, 'Beltara,
mon bon, is the painter of ideals; he does not paint my wife as she is, he paints her as she ought to be.'"
"Well," interrupted young Lieutenant Dundas, "if you can make my breeches lace in front, I should be most grateful. I look like a damned fool as it is now!"
The following week Beltara, who had managed to get hold of some paints, made excellent studies in oil of Colonel Parker and Major Knight. The major, who was stout, found his corporation somewhat exaggerated.
"Yes," said the painter, "but with the varnish, you know——"
And with an expressive movement of his hands he made as if to restore the figure to more normal dimensions.