“Bronze—green bronze.”
“Green bronze!” repeated Gudrun, coldly accepting his challenge. She was thinking of the slender, immature, tender limbs of the girl, smooth and cold in green bronze.
“Yes, beautiful,” she murmured, looking up at him with a certain dark homage.
He closed his eyes and looked aside, triumphant.
“Why,” said Ursula, “did you make the horse so stiff? It is as stiff as a block.”
“Stiff?” he repeated, in arms at once.
“Yes. Look how stock and stupid and brutal it is. Horses are sensitive, quite delicate and sensitive, really.”
He raised his shoulders, spread his hands in a shrug of slow indifference, as much as to inform her she was an amateur and an impertinent nobody.
“Wissen Sie,” he said, with an insulting patience and condescension in his voice, “that horse is a certain form, part of a whole form. It is part of a work of art, a piece of form. It is not a picture of a friendly horse to which you give a lump of sugar, do you see—it is part of a work of art, it has no relation to anything outside that work of art.”
Ursula, angry at being treated quite so insultingly de haut en bas, from the height of esoteric art to the depth of general exoteric amateurism, replied, hotly, flushing and lifting her face.