“If you want to chuck your money away, it’s your lookout,” said his mentor, candidly. “You don’t hurt him.”
“Then he won’t say anything?”
“It doesn’t matter what he says. He’s not up to much.”
“No?” queried Matt, astonished. “Isn’t he a great painter?”
The student laughed silently. “A great painter keep a school!” he said. “No; it’s only the failures that do that!”
“Then how can one learn?” asked Matt, in dismay.
“Oh, well, we have a visitor once a week—he’s rather a good man. Tarmigan! He’s not an R.A., but he can knock off a head in twenty minutes.”
“But the R.A.’s—what are they for?” inquired Matt, only partially reassured.
“For show,” said the young man, smartly. “You are a green un, to think that you’re going to get Academicians for thirty bob a month. You’ve got to go to the Academy Schools if you want them. And then the chaps say they’re not much use. Most of them are out of date, and you get a different man every month who contradicts all the others. A fellow I know says the best of the visitors is Marmor, but he’s awfully noisy and facetious, and claps you on the back, and tells you a story, and forgets to criticise. And then there’s Peters—he sighs and says ‘Very tender,’ and you think you’ve improved, till you hear him say ‘Very tender’ to the next man too. The chief advantage of going to a school is that you get a model which you couldn’t afford to hire for yourself, and you learn from the other fellows. And then, of course, there’s composition—Tarmigan’s jolly good for that.”
By this time Matt had sketched his outline, and he was about to resume the brush when the clock struck eight. The model stretched herself and retired behind the dirty sheet, which now operated as a screen, and there was a rising, a putting down of palettes (each with its brushes stuck idly in its thumb-hole), an outburst of exclamations, a striking of matches, a mechanical rolling of cigarettes, a sudden lowering of the lights, and a general air of breaking up.