At first, they tacitly avoided any reference to Alec or Delgratz. Their talk dealt with art and artists, and Joan had a good deal to say about the delights of painting in the open air.
Felix blinked at her sagely. "Behold, then, the beginning of the end!" he cackled.
"The end of what?" she asked, with some kindling of suspicion, since her queer little friend's tricks of conversation were not new to her.
"Of your career as an artist. Barbizon is fatal to true emotion. It induces a fine sense of the beauty of sunsets, of diffused light in sylvan solitudes, of blues that are greens and browns that are reds. In a word, the study of nature inclines one toward truth, whereas art is essentially a gracious lie. That is why the Greeks were the greatest artists: because they were most pleasing liars. They understood the crassness of humanity. Long before Browning wrote Fra Lippo Lippi they realized that
"We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see;
And so they are better painted—better to us,
Which is the same thing."
Joan laughed, and the cheery sound of her mirth seemed to startle the staid folk in the car.
At a neighboring table a middle aged couple were dining, the woman dignified and matronly, the man small, slight, with a curiously bloated aspect which, on analysis, seemed to arise from puffy cheeks and thick, sensual lips. He said something that caused his companion to turn and look at Joan; for the woman is yet unborn who will hear another woman described as pretty and not want to decide for herself how far the statement is justified.
So the eyes of the two met, and Joan saw a worn, kindly face, endowed with a quiet charm of expression and delicacy of contour that offered a marked contrast to the man's unprepossessing features. Both women were too well bred to stare, and Joan instantly brought her wits to bear on Poluski's quip; but that fleeting glimpse had thrilled her with subtle recognition of something grasped yet elusive, of a knowledge that trembled on the lip of discovery, like a half remembered word murmuring in the brain but unable to make itself heard.
"Do you ever say what you really mean, Felix?" she asked.
"Far too often, my belle. That is why I am only a copyist.