“Technique can’t be talked,” he said, still surly.
“We haven’t any materials for practical demonstrations,” said Olive, “not even a black-board.”
“I should love to be an artist,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “To feel beauty growing under one’s hand—what a sense of creative divinity. I never sit to an artist without thinking what a privilege is his—— Now what are you laughing at, Olive?”
“Nothing, except your subtle way of complimenting yourself on your good looks. Now, if Mr. Strang will be good, and waste a little more valuable time on two foolish women, I will pay him a compliment.”
He sat down, his curiosity stimulated, and Olive, producing a box of Turkish cigarettes, asked if he objected to her smoking. Permission being obtained, she got him to apply a light to her cigarette, and then bade him smoke one himself. He was relieved to find Mrs. Wyndwood an abstainer.
“There,” said Olive, puffing out a thin cloud, “that is the highest compliment I can pay a man—to expose myself in all my horror. I smoke neither for toothache nor neuralgia, but for sheer viciousness. See the result of our visit to Podnieff—Nor picked up ideals, and I, smoke. Perhaps they are the same thing in the long-run.”
Matthew Strang dissented vehemently. “Ideals are the only realities.”
“Nonsense, they are the only things that change,” retorted Miss Regan. “The ideal woman of to-morrow will smoke shag and birdseye in long clay pipes.”
Eleanor Wyndwood came to his assistance, and together they did battle with Olive, who took up the most perverse Philistine positions and fought as if for life, eluding, shuffling, dodging, equivocating, turning, twisting, doubling upon herself with the most daring defiance of consistency, and the most bizarre flashes of wit and argument. She would snatch a victory by specious logic that could only hold for a moment, and stand in as serenely mocking triumph upon a crumbling sand-heap as if she knew herself upon a rock, and was not about to bound off to the next sand-heap the instant the tide of reason swept this one hopelessly away. The painter found a celestial knitting of soul in thus fighting side by side with Eleanor; he did not blench even when she quoted a quatrain from Harold Lavender to enforce her point. But the shades of earth returned when she referred to Herbert Strang.
“Here is an example of a man who has absolutely nothing to gain from Art—who doesn’t need it, who has means—to whose sceptical spirit the applause of the world is indifferent. And yet the other morning—when the sunshine called one to the joys of the dolce far niente—he sat for hours toiling painfully at his Art, and fretting because he had allowed his right hand to lose its cunning. He had neglected the Ideal, but now his soul thirsts for it again, and the Ideal is avenged.”