“Oh, who should I mention it to?” asked Matt, reassuringly.
“That’s a good chap. You see, if it got out that I talked it over with you there might be a bother; people are so jealous, especially now that it has won.”
“Oh, I sha’n’t tell a soul, you may depend,” said Matt. “It was very good of you to let me come so often and chat about it; and even if I did save you a little trouble in working out the perspective, I learned a great deal about composition from you.”
“Don’t mention it,” said Herbert.
“Oh, I won’t,” said Matt, gravely; whereat Herbert laughed, and replied: “Now you must do an Academy picture, old fellow. There’s three months’ time yet.”
“Would there be any chance of my getting in?” asked Matt, wistfully. He had been fluttered by the applause of the evening; it seemed impossibly grand to be the centre of an admiring fashionable assemblage, instead of a shabby alien hovering on its outside rim. In such company the colossal self-confidence of his solitary exaltations dwindled to a pitiful sense of his real insignificance.
“Rather,” replied Herbert. “Why, I thank my stars you weren’t a competitor. I should never have got the medal if you had been.”
Matt shook his head deprecatingly, but Herbert rattled on with increasing enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t it be jolly if you got a picture in and it was hung on the line next to mine? Now that I’ve taught you composition and educated you up to the Academy’s ideas, you could easily do something that would take the old buffers’ fancy, and then, once you got a show in the Academy, the Old Gentleman would take up your work and run you.”
“I don’t think they’d take what I wanted to do.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t want to do it,” said Herbert. “At least, not till you can afford it. Besides, I’m not so sure that there isn’t something in the Academy’s ideas, after all. Candidly, I don’t quite see how Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar could have been treated any better.”