Mr. Mainwaring rose to a splendour of pomposity.
“Copy?” he said. “And could I copy the fiery execution of it? You speak of pictures, my Peter, as if they could be produced like boots or hats. The intending purchaser—I do not say whether or no I refer to Lady Darley—wants no cold replica. She insists on the one that came hot and terrible from the furnace of my imagination.”
“Then on certain conditions,” said Peter, “Lady Darley—I mean the purchaser—may have it.”
“Name them,” said his father, looking like a captive king.
“The first is that you completely withdraw, and if possible regret, the use of the expression ‘pittance,’ in connection with the price you received for it. There’s an implication of meanness about it with regard to Mrs. Wardour.”
Mr. Mainwaring clicked his thumb and finger as if to say, “That for what I sold it for.”
“I make no such implication,” he said. “Mrs. Wardour or anybody else is well within her rights in acquiring fine work at such prices as the artist is obliged from straitened circumstances to accept.”
“The point is,” said Peter, “that you hadn’t often, if ever, been obliged to accept a thousand guineas before for any picture.”
“And may not an artist, after years of unremitting endeavour, be allowed to come into his own and enjoy the appreciation he has long merited?” asked Mr. Mainwaring.
“Certainly he may: we are all delighted. But when he does—when, that is to say, you at length receive a high price for a picture, you shouldn’t, because you are offered immediately afterwards a higher price, talk of a pittance as applied to the first. You thought yourself, father,” continued Peter pleasantly and inexorably, “remarkably fortunate to get a thousand guineas.”