'Is it going to be done?'
'It will be when they see my designs.'
Clara bit her lip. This was precisely what she had hoped to scotch by coming to London. In Paris he had made marvellous designs. Artists had come to look at them and then they had been put away in a portfolio.
'What I want,' said he, 'is a patron, some one who, having made his money in soap, or pills, or margarine, wishes to make reparation through art.... Michael Angelo had a patron and I ought to have one, so that I can do for my theatre what he did for the Sistine Chapel.'
They didn't build the Sistine Chapel for him.'
'No.... N—o,' he mumbled.
'Don't you see that things are different now, Charles. Everything has to pay nowadays, and there aren't great public works for artists to do. Michael Angelo was an engineer as well.... You couldn't design a theatre without an architect now, could you?'
'Why should I when there are architects to do it?' He was beginning to get angry.
'If you could you would be able to carry out your own theories as well.... People want something more than drawings on paper....'
'You talk as though I had done nothing.'