"I think you could make me feel personal interest in brickbats or—or spiders," she said, with a quaint, relaxing smile. "You were born to be a preacher, not a soldier."
"Do you think so? I've had a notion all along that I was a fairly good commander and a mighty poor persuader; what I don't intend to be is a bore." He rose and began to walk slowly round the walls, studying the paintings under her direction. He was struggling with obscure impulses to other and more important speech, but after making the circuit of the room he said, as though rendering a final verdict:
"You have great talent; that is evident. What do you intend to do with it? It should help some one."
"You are old-fashioned," she replied. "In our modern day, art is content to add beauty to the world; it does not trouble itself to do good. It is unmoral."
"Perhaps I am a preacher, after all, for I like the book or picture that has a motive, that stands for something. Your conception of art's uses is French, is it not?"
"I suppose it is; clearly, it isn't Germanic. What would you have me do—paint Indians to convince the world of their sufferings?"
"Wouldn't that be something like the work Millet did? Seems to me I remember something of that sort in some book I have read."
She laughed. "Unfortunately, I am not Millet; besides, he isn't the god of our present idolatry. He's a dead duck. We paint skirt-dancers and the singers in the cafés now. Toiling peasants are 'out.'"
"You are a woman, and a woman ought—"
"Please don't hand me any of that stupid rot about what a woman ought to be, and isn't. What I am I am, and I don't like dirty, ragged people, no matter whether they are Roman beggars or Chinese. I like clean, well-dressed, well-mannered people and no one can make me believe they are less than a lot of ill-smelling Indians."