"With my first leave, certainly," twinkled Morland.
As the weeks passed by in April, the artistic world of Porthkeverne reached a high pitch of anticipation and excitement. Practically every painter there had submitted something to the Academy, and the burning question was which among them would be lucky enough to have their work accepted. They looked out eagerly for the post, awaiting either a welcome varnishing ticket or a printed notice regretting that for lack of space their contributions could not be included in the exhibition, and requesting them to remove their pictures as speedily as possible.
In the studio down by the harbour expectation ran rife. Margaret Lindsay had finished her painting of "Kilmeny"—if not altogether to her own satisfaction, at any rate to that of most of her friends—and had dispatched it to the Academy.
"I don't believe for a moment that it will get in," she assured Lorraine. "I never seem to have any luck, somehow. I'm not a lucky person."
"Perhaps you will have this time," said Lorraine, who was washing out oil paint brushes for her friend, a messy task which she sometimes undertook. "Let's will that you shall be accepted. You shall be!"
"All the 'willing' in the world won't do the deed if the judges 'will' the other way, and their will tugs harder than ours!" laughed Margaret. "It depends so much on the taste of the judges. There's a fashion in pictures as in other things, and it's constantly changing."
"Is there? Why?"
"That I can't tell you, except that people tire of one style and like another. First the classical school was the favourite, then pre-Raphaelitism had its innings, then impressionism came up. Each period in painting is generally boomed by some celebrated art critic who deprecates the old-fashioned methods and cracks up the new. The public are rather like sheep. They buy what the critics tell them to admire. Punch had a delightful skit on that once. Ruskin had been pitching into the commonplace artist's style of picture rather freely, so Punch evolved a dejected brother of the brush giving vent to this despairing wail:
'I takes and paints,
Hears no complaints,
And sells before I'm dry;
Then savage Ruskin
He sticks his tusk in,
And nobody will buy!'"
"I love Punch!" cackled Lorraine, drying the brushes on a clean paint-rag. "Tell me some more artistic titbits."