“I’ve no doubt they have, Mr. Lauderdale,” answered the painter. “I never thought of questioning the fact.”
“Oh! I thought you did. I understood that you were laughing at the idea.”
“Not at all. It was the use of the word ‘intrinsic’ as applied to the value of the soul which struck me as odd.”
“Ah—that is quite another matter, my dear sir,” replied the old gentleman, who was quickly appeased. “My son first used the word in this discussion. I’m not responsible for it. The younger generation is not so careful in its language as we were taught to be. But the important point, after all, is that idiots have souls.”
“The soul is the only thing anybody really can be said to have as his own,” said Crowdie, thoughtfully.
Katharine glanced at him. He did not look like the kind of man to make such a speech with sincerity. She wondered vaguely what his soul would be like, if she could see it, and it seemed to her that it would be something strange—white, with red lips, singing an evil song, which she could not understand, in a velvet voice, and that it would smell of musk. The side of her that was towards him instinctively shrank a little from him.
“I am glad to hear you say that, Mr. Crowdie,” said the philanthropist with approbation. “It closes the discussion very fittingly. I hope we shall hear no more of idiots not having souls. Poor things! It is almost the only thing they have that makes them like the rest of us.”
“People are all so different,” replied the artist. “I find that more and more true every day. And it takes a soul to understand a soul. Otherwise photography would take the place of portrait painting.”
“I don’t quite see that,” said Alexander Junior, who had employed the last few minutes in satisfying his first pangs of hunger, having been interrupted by the passage of arms with his father. “What becomes of colour in photography?”
“What becomes of colour in a charcoal or pen and ink drawing?” asked Crowdie. “Yet either, if at all good, is preferable to the best photograph.”