"Does he write to her?"
"Don't know—very likely; these artistic people can do things other people can't. We all went to see the Lamberts off at the Nord, and had champagne at the buffet; and poor old Fragonard—he was another worshipper, an artist you know—turned up with a huge big bouquet of violets for Fanny; we asked him where he'd got them, and he said he'd stolen them. They don't care a fig for poverty, artists; make a joke of it you know. Yes, I daresay he writes to Fanny. Heidenheimer writes to me every week—says he's dying in love with me, and sends poems, screechingly funny poems, all about nightingales and arrows and hearts. He's an artist too, and I'd marry him, I believe I would, only we're both as poor as Lazarus."
"Mr Leavesley is an artist you say?"
"Yes, but he's a genius, but genius doesn't pay—that's to say at first—afterwards—afterwards it's different. Trading rats for diamonds in famine time isn't in it with a genius when he gets on the make."
Mr Bevan gazed reflectively at the tips of his shoes. He quite recognised that these long-haired and out-at-elbowed anomalies y'clept geniuses had the trick, at times, of making money. A dim sort of wrath against the whole species possessed him. To a clean, correct, and level-headed gentleman possessed of broad acres and a huge rent-roll, it is unpleasant to think that a slovenly, shiftless happy-go-lucky tatterdemallion may be a clean, correct and level-headed gentleman's, superior both in brains, fascination, and even in wealth. We can fancy the correct one subscribing sympathy, if not money, to a society for the extinction of genius, were not such a body entirely superfluous in the present condition of human affairs.
"It may be," said Mr Bevan at last, "that those people are very pleasant and all that, and useful in the world and so on, but I confess I like to associate with people who cut their hair, and, not to put too fine a point on it, wash——"
"Oh, Leavesley washes," said Miss Morgan, "he's as clean as a new pin. And as for cutting his hair, my!—that's what spoils him in my opinion; why, it's cut to the bone almost, like a convict's. All artists cut their hair now; it's only Polish piano-players and violinists wear their hair long."
"Whether they cut their hair 'to the bone' or wear it long is a matter of indifference," said Mr Bevan. "They're all a lot of bounders, and I'd be sorry to see a sister of mine married amongst them—very sorry."