“I’m not a messy feeder,” said Ronnie.
“You don’t paint with it, then?”
“Only Cubist pictures.”
Sylvia launched out into an account of her work, and demanded his help for the painting of the scene.
“I want the back-cloth to be a city, not to represent a city, mark you, but to be a city.”
She told him about New York as beheld from the Metropolitan Tower, and exacted from the chosen painter the ability to make the audience think that.
“I’m too old-fashioned for you, my dear,” said Ronald.
“Oh, you, my dear man, of course. If I asked you for a city, you’d give me a view from a Pierrot’s window of a Harlequin who’d stolen the first five numbers of the Yellow Book from a Pantaloon who kept a second-hand bookshop in a street-scene by Steinlen, and whose daughter, Columbine, having died of grief at being deserted by the New English Art Club, had been turned into a book-plate. No, I want some fierce young genius of to-day.”
Over their drinks they discussed possible candidates; finally Ronald said he would invite a certain number of the most representative and least representational modern painters to his studio, from whom Sylvia might make her choice. Accordingly, two or three days later Sylvia visited Ronald in Grosvenor Road. For the moment, when she entered, she thought that he had been playing a practical joke upon her, for it seemed impossible that these extraordinary people could be real. The northerly light of the studio, severe and virginal, was less kind than the feverish exhalation of the Café Royal.
“They are real?” she whispered to her host.