“You mean because he is,” said Matthew Strang, with melancholy facetiousness.
“No, nothing of the kind; that rather prejudices me in his favor. You mustn’t forget I prophesied it. You don’t mean to say you admire his ‘Ariadne in Naxos’? ‘Poached lady on greens,’ I marked it in my catalogue. Do laugh! You look as dull and faded as an Old Master. I think I shall have to restore you. Here, have some whiskey yourself. You’re damned unsociable.”
“I rarely drink,” the host said, feebly.
“You used to drink my whiskey,” Herbert reminded him, and as he poured himself out a little in deference to his brilliant cousin, he thought how queerly things had inverted themselves.
“The Triumph of Bacchus,” said Herbert, laughing. “Now I’ve put in the good spirit, I’ll exorcise the bad, as David did to Saul.” And crossing over to the piano he played a lively air.
“I picked up that from a Spanish gypsy,” he said. “Not George Eliot’s. But I’m sinking to puns. It’s the English climate. You’ve got no wit here, and there isn’t even a word for esprit. Let’s examine your pictures. Ha! Hum! I see you’ve got quite a number on your hands. I suppose they must be the good ones. Ah! What do you call that thing—the lady in blue and the harp?”
“ ‘Ideal Womanhood,’ ” answered the painter, adding, hastily: “It’s just been returned from Australia. I lent it to an international exhibition. They beguiled me with the prospect it would be bought by the Government.”
“Ideal moonshine, I should call it,” laughed Herbert. “There never was such moonlight on sea or land. And does the ideal woman play the harp on snowy mountain-tops at midnight without a chaperon?”
“It’s supposed to be symbolic, you know, of her inspiring man to nobler heights,” explained the artist, with an embarrassed air.
He wondered vaguely what had become of that beautiful woman—what was her name?—whose casual words at a garden-party had driven him back for a time into what he thought was the true path of his Art.