“Form is an elusive term,” I said, “impossible of hard and fast definition. There is no way of proving that any two of us agree about it—no way of ascertaining that our mental and material optics come to the same conclusion with regard to it.”
“Then why should you expect people to take your view of it, in—in a thing like this?”
“I don’t—in a thing like this. I merely utter my protest in the thing against the accepted conventions of form. It is an impression, conveyed and caught through atmospheric vibration, of what form actually suggested, at that particular moment, in that particular instance, to my individual temperament.”
“I think,” she said calmly, after a pause, “that that is nonsense.”
“What,” I demanded, astonished, “is nonsense?”
“All that talk about impressions and individual temperaments. It is only an excuse for idleness—for trying the short cut to laborious ends. It is so much easier to spend an hour over a picture—over a canvas—than a month. A burglar might claim just the same excuse for stealing a year’s income in a night, instead of earning it in a year. Besides, if your temperament is individual, what is the good of trying to impose it on people who have individual temperaments of their own. You can’t expect them to understand you; so what is the good?”
“None,” I said briefly—and grimly. This “mild mental stimulant” was beginning to reveal itself a headier posset than I had ever dreamed it to be.
“Then,” she answered, “why do you protest? You know you said you did.”
“As a revolutionist, I am bound to,” I replied weakly.
“A revolutionist from what?”