"I dunnaw."
"No more does anybody. It can't be helped. But I must try my best and make it real—each spike, as I see it—the dead gray ones on the ground and the live green ones on the tree, and the baby ones and the old gray-pointed ones, which have seen their best days and will presently die and fall—I must paint them all, Joan."
She laughed.
"Don't laugh," he said, very seriously. "Only an artist would laugh at me, not you who love Nature. There lives a great painter, Joan, who paints pictures that nobody else in the wide world can paint. He is growing old, but he is not too old to take trouble still. Once, when he was a young man, he drew a lemon-tree far away in Italy. It was only a little lemon-tree, but the artist rose morning after morning and drew it leaf by leaf, twig by twig, until every leaf and bud and lemon and bough had appeared. It was not labored and false; it was grand because it was true: a joy forever; work Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost Oriental. A thing, Joan Tregenza, worth a wilderness of 'harmonies' and 'impressions,' 'nocturnes' and 'notes,' smudges and audacities. But I suppose that is all gibberish to you?"
"Iss, so it be," she admitted.
"Learn to love everything that is beautiful, my good child. But I think you do, unconsciously perhaps."
"I don't take much 'count of things." "Yes, unconsciously. You have a cowslip there stuck in your frock, though where you got it from I can't imagine. The flower is a month too early."
"Iss, 'tis, I found en in a lew, sunshiny plaace. Us have got a frame for growin' things under glass, an' it had bin put down 'pon top this cowslip an' drawed 'en up."
"Will you give it to me?"
She did so, and he smelled it.