She was smiling. "Oh, I don't object," she said, "so long as they are well shaped."
Mr. Nevins upheld her from an artistic stand-point.
"I hold," he said, authoritatively, "that indecency can only exist where beauty is wanting. All beauty is moral. I have noticed in regard to my models—"
"On the contrary," interrupted Mr. Paul, "there is no such thing as beauty. It is merely the creation of a diseased imagination pursuing novelty. We call nature beautiful, but it is only a term we employ to express a chimera of the senses. Nature is not beautiful. Its colors are glaringly defective. It is ugly. The universe is ugly. Civilization is ugly. We are ugly—"
"Oh, Mr. Paul!" said Miss Musin, reproachfully.
"Our one consolation," continued Mr. Paul, in an unmoved voice, "is the knowledge that if we could possibly have been uglier we should have been so created. Providence would have seen to it."
"When Providence provided ugliness," put in Mr. Morris, good-naturedly, "it provided ignorance along with it."
Mr. Ardly, who was eating his dinner with a copy of the Evening Post spread out upon his knees, looked up languidly.
"We are becoming unpleasantly personal," he remarked. "Personalities in conversation should be avoided as sedulously as onions in soup. They are stimulating, but vulgar."
Mr. Paul seized the bait of the unconscious thrower with avidity.