"The critics always pitch into everything," Irons responded with a growl. "It's the taste of the people I want to please. I believe in art as a popular educator, and people can't be educated by things they won't look at."
"Oh, as to that," Stewart Hubbard rejoined, with a twinkle in his eye, "conventionality is after all the consensus of the taste of mankind."
Peter Calvin was at a loss to tell whether his friend was in earnest or was only quizzing Irons, so he contented himself with an appreciative look, and a smile of dazzling warmth. Irons, on the other hand, looked toward the speaker with suspicion.
"I haven't much sympathy with a good deal of the stuff artists talk," he continued, following his own train of thought. "It doesn't square very well with common sense and ain't much more than pure gassing, I think. The truth is, genius is mostly moonshine. The man I call a genius is the one that makes things work practically."
"In other words," said Calvin, spurred to emulate Hubbard's epigram, and involuntarily glancing toward the latter for approval, "you think a genius is a man who is able to harness Pegasus to the plough, and make him work without kicking things to pieces."
"That's about it," Irons assented; "and I think Herman is too toploftical and full of cranky theories. They say Mrs. Greyson has hit the nail exactly on the head in that statue she showed in Paris last year. That pleased the critics and the public both, and that's exactly what we are after. I think we ought to ask her to make a design."
Mr. Calvin saw and seized the opportunity easily to introduce his own especial candidate.
"If each of you have a sculptor," he said, lightly, "I can hardly do less than to have one, too. There's an exceedingly clever fellow just home from Rome, that I want to see given a chance. He's done some very promising work, and I look upon him as the coming man."
The two men regarded him with some interest, as one who has introduced a new element into a game. Mr. Hubbard leaned back in his chair, and sent a puff of cigar smoke floating upward, before he answered.
"I can't enter my man for the triangular contest," said he. "He won't go into a competition unless he's paid for making the design. He says, in so many words, that he doesn't want the commission to make the statue unless he can do it in his own way. He will be unhindered, or he will let the whole thing alone."