“Not much. But then they think I’m queer. My father’s a doctor. He wanted me to be a doctor, but I’ve got a hundred-and-fifty of my own, so I can do what I like. I shall go to London as soon as I’m through here. It’s no good being a painter here. They all think it’s a joke, a sort of excuse for doing nothing.”
“I know. They think pictures are produced automatically—like everything else.”
“Old Benskin’s automatic enough.”
“Exactly. He can work just as he can go to sleep, almost without knowing that he’s doing it. It’s a matter of habit. He’s almost forgotten how he used to despise that sort of thing.”
“Do you think he ever did?”
“Of course, or his work wouldn’t be as good as it is.”
“I can’t understand people ceasing to be keen.”
“I can. You only need to wobble a very little to come down on the wrong side. Then you’re done for—in Hell. And after a bit you find that you quite like it, except in awful moments when you realise that after all it is Hell and that you might so easily have been in Heaven.”
“I know what you mean. You mean that the whole thing rests with yourself. But it’s rotten luck when you’re weak and can’t help doing the wrong thing though you see the right thing the whole time.”
“But we’re all like that. We only go to Hell when we do the wrong thing and pretend that it’s the right.”