“Do what?” asked the lightning artist.
“Give up all your time to it, be in earnest over it. Nothing is done in this world without earnestness of purpose. I am sure you would be—would be—a great artist if you worked. Give up cock-fighting and all that, and take seriously to art.”
“Do you know,” said Prince Toto, putting the blind beggar away, “I have often thought of kicking the world over. I’ve seen everything and done everything worth doing, and I feel as old as the hills.”
“He, he, he!” bleated the Marquis de Nani.
“Then why not begin at once?” said Helen. “If you are only in earnest and have purpose, you will succeed, for I am sure you have genius.”
The unlucky little word had escaped unweighed by the speaker. Toto nodded reflectively, as if to some thought that had just left the shelter of his curly head to take visible form.
“I am sure that M. le Prince has more genius in that head of his than resides in all those palette-scrapers one sees in the Louvre,” declared the Marquis de Nani, taking a pinch of snuff and making a little old-fashioned bow, as if to the observation that had just escaped from him. He held out his box, and the amateur genius took a pinch and sneezed frightfully.
“And genius,” continued the old gentleman reflectively, adding on two hundred and fifty francs to the intended loan, “it seems to me, never has a more charming home than with a man of birth; birth comes out even in a picture. That blind beggar and his little daughter. Ah, my God! cannot one see the sympathy of the well-born for the poor illuminating it? I never praise—old age has made a wreck of my enthusiasm; but my heart rekindles when I see art thus wrested from the hands of the hateful canaille by one of us.”
“Indeed!” said Helen Powers, whose father had been a pig-slaughterer.
“Indeed yes, mademoiselle!” replied the old man, winking and blinking like a delirious goat, whilst Toto looked on with a grin. “I have left all my ambition behind me, buried beneath the ruins of the Empire, else would I wish to be young like M. le Prince, and gifted like the painter of these treasures.”