“What is?”
“Skin-deep beauty. How can you talk such nonsense and pretend to be an artist? There is no such thing. Just as if the skin could be anything but what the bones and the muscles underneath make it!”
That was not, perhaps, very original; yet a wonder perpetually grew in me over the extraordinary precocity of this young woman of nineteen. Her dictatorialness I could understand: it was just unaffected class assurance. What I could not understand was the positiveness of her views, where her views came in question. As I stood, with nothing to say, she looked up at me.
“What made you come to be an artist at all?” she asked.
“O!” I answered: “I suppose the usual creative itch—the desire to produce beautiful things.”
“Comme ça!” She gave a little shrug implying helplessness. “I should have thought the scalpel was more in your line than the pencil.”
“Why?”
“O, just because you are so inquisitive. Were you obliged to do something for a living?”
“More or less,” I said. “But I haven’t been very successful.”
“Were you born of the people, Monsieur?”