“Good-bye!” said Jimmy, getting up. “I have to meet my wife at ten.”
“Oh, there’s lots of time,” said Cornpepper. “Carrie, pass Jimmy the whiskey. Sit down, there’s a good chap.” And Jimmy sat down.
“Style’s going to be a square touch and a feathery outline,” said Greme, sarcastically.
“Style’s merely a decorative appearance,” said Mack. “A picture is primarily a wall-decoration; it has no right to exist for itself.”
“Hear, hear!” cried Herbert. Mack lived up to his principles, for he always saw Nature as a pretty pattern.
“Style’s an accident; look at the blottesque effects you get in water-color,” said Rocks.
“The last and greatest art—the art to blot,” quoted Levison, the second journalist, who also posed as a war-artist in times of peace.
“When I was in Antwerp, under Villat,” said Rapper—”a fierce little man he was—he used to come and correct our canvases with big blotches of burnt sienna and lamp-black on the last day of a model. Rocks would call that a blottesque effect. Now I flatter myself I can tell you what style is, though I don’t profess to get it myself. Style is—”
“The art of leaving in—or leaving out—accidents,” finished Rocks. “You see that so well in Fortuny’s work.”
“Jimmy gets his effects by leaving out all the dead lines of his first sketch,” said Wilfred Smith, the journalist; “don’t you, Jimmy?”