“I will tell my friend to be careful,” said Murrel, with a smile. “I know she wants to work on the old lines.”
“Ah, quite so,” said the old man, suddenly lifting his head with quite a consequential air. “I shall always be ready to give any advice . . . any advice that can be of any use, I’m sure.” He cleared his throat with quite a formidable return of fullness in his voice. “The thing to remember, first of all, of course, is that this type of colouring is in its nature opaque. So many people confuse the fact that it is brilliant with some notion of its being transparent. I myself have always seen that the confusion arose through the parallel of stained glass. Both, of course, were typically medieval crafts, and Morris was very keen on both of them. But I remember how wild he used to be if anybody forgot that glass is transparent. ‘If anybody paints a single thing in a window that looks really solid,’ he used to say, ‘he ought to be made to sit on it.’”
Murrel resumed his enquiry.
“I suppose, Dr. Hendry,” he said, “that your old chemical studies helped you a great deal in making these colours?”
The old gentleman shook his head thoughtfully.
“Chemistry alone would hardly have taught me all I know,” he said. “It is a question of optics. It is a question of physiology.” He suddenly thrust his beard across the table and said rapidly in a hissing voice, “It is even more a question of pathological psychology.”
“Oh,” said the visitor, and waited for what would happen next.
“Do you know,” said Hendry with a sudden sobriety of tone, “do you know why I lost all of my customers? Do you know why I have come down to this?”
“As far as I can make out,” said Murrel with a certain surly energy that was a surprise to himself, “You seem to have been damnably badly treated by a lot of people who wanted to sell their own goods.”
The expert gently smiled and shook his head.