"You foolish boy, is a Turk ever in love? I mean I would rather see you wasting, in successive follies, the best years of your youth, than see you a painter. There comes a time, when, of his own accord, a man gives up passion; but when does the unlucky wight who has once begun to write poetry or paint pictures give them up?"
"Never, unless he never loved them," replied Cornelius, with a triumphant smile; "poetry or painting, which I hold to be far higher, becomes part of a man's being, and follows him to the grave. But it is a desecration to speak of it as a human passion. I am not hard-hearted; but if Venus in all her charms, or, to use a stronger figure of speech, if one of Raffaelle's divine women were to become flesh and blood for my sake, and implore me to return her passion—"
"Why you would of course; don't make yourself out more flinty than you are; it would not take one of Raffaelle's women to do that either."
"Hear me out: if to win this lovely creature I should give up painting, not for ever, not for ten years, nor yet five, but just for one year,— Kate, she might walk back to her canvas."
"Conceited fellow!" indignantly said Kate, divided between vexation at his predilection for Art, and the slight thrown on her sex.
"It is not conceit, Kate; it is the superior attraction of Art over passion. How is it you do not see there is and can be nothing like painting pictures?" Kate groaned. "It beats all else hollow,—poetry, music, ambition, war, and love, which is held master of all. Alexander, unhappy man! wept because he had no more worlds to win. Did Apelles ever weep for having no more pictures to paint? Paris carried off Helen to Troy, which was taken after a ten years' siege. Imagine Paris an artist; he paints Helen under a variety of attitudes: Menelaus benevolently looking on; little Hermione plays near her mamma; Troy stands in the distance, with Priam on the walls; everything peace and harmony.—Moral: if fine gentlemen would take the portraits, and not the persons of fair ladies, we should not hear so much of invaded hearths and affairs of honour."
"Will you talk seriously?" impatiently said Kate.
"As seriously as you can wish," he replied gravely. "What do you fear for me? It is late to begin, but I have been working hard these two years. What about our poor father? many a great painter has been the son of a disappointed artist. What even about the difficulty of winning fame? I am ambitious, not so much to be famous, as to do great things. There is the aim of a life; there is the glorious victory to win."
His handsome face had never looked half so handsome: it expressed daring, power, hope, ardour, all that subdues the future to a man's will.
"I tell you," he resumed, with a short triumphant laugh, "that I shall succeed. I feel the power within me; I shall give fame to the name of O'Reilly, stuff your pockets with money, charm your eyes with fair forms; in short I shall conquer Art."