“Oh!—Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have said her money. She had no money. I meant that her husband had money and didn’t spend it on her. A mere slip of the tongue.”
“Good. I’m a regular cross-examiner, you see.”
“True. You might prove a difficult witness in the chair. My friend—my client, informed me that her husband was so lazy that he remained in bed until one or two o’clock in the afternoon; then he would slowly dress and saunter for a walk, and often she did not see him until the next morning.”
“How did he make a living?”
“Oh, I suppose he painted a portrait or two and managed to get on.”
“A portrait or two? That would hardly pay household expenses—that is, unless your friend—I mean your client’s husband, was a Sargent or a Boldini. Then they could have struggled along at the rate of one portrait every year.” Serle laughed so harshly that Marden looked at him wonderingly.
“I see you are acquainted with the artistic temperament, as they call it in the newspapers,” observed the lawyer.
“Not as they call it, but as it is. My dear sir, an artist is not built to put in a ton of coal every day. A man whose brain is delicately adjusted, whose whole soul is in his eyes——”
“When he sees a pretty girl?” The sly tone of Marden angered the painter.
“No, hang it! For a painter there are no pretty, no ugly girls; no pretty, no ugly landscapes; no agreeable, no disagreeable subjects. Only a surface to be transferred to canvas, to be truthfully rendered. And that’s what business men, with their lack of imagination, will never understand.” He spoke hotly.