“If you will excuse me, I will return to my work.”
Then I felt as if I must say something, for I had shown him no courtesy during the interview.
“It must be a great pleasure to carry away such talismans with you—capable of bringing the place back to your mental vision at any moment.”
“To tell the truth,” he answered, “I am a little ashamed of being found sketching here. Such bits of scenery are not of my favourite studies. But it is a change.”
“It is very beautiful here,” I said, in a tone of contravention.
“It is very pretty,” he answered—“very lovely, if you will—not very beautiful, I think. I would keep that word for things of larger regard. Beauty requires width, and here is none. I had almost said this place was fanciful—the work of imagination in her play-hours, not in her large serious moods. It affects me like the face of a woman only pretty, about which boys and guardsmen will rave—to me not very interesting, save for its single lines.”
“Why, then, do you sketch the place?”
“A very fair question,” he returned, with a smile. “Just because it is soothing from the very absence of beauty. I would far rather, however, if I were only following my taste, take the barest bit of the moor above, with a streak of the cold sky over it. That gives room.”
“You would like to put a skylark in it, wouldn’t you?”
“That I would if I knew how. I see you know what I mean. But the mere romantic I never had much taste for; though if you saw the kind of pictures I try to paint, you would not wonder that I take sketches of places like this, while in my heart of hearts I do not care much for them. They are so different, and just therefore they are good for me. I am not working now; I am only playing.”