"Thirds!" came the echo.
"Perhaps you're of the old school?" he observed.
"Really—I must be!" agreed the lady.
"Ah!" said Billy softly, commiseratingly. He cocked his head at an angle opposite from the slant of the lorgnette and stared his own amazing canvas out of countenance.
"Then, of course," he said, "this hardly conveys——"
"What are you?" she demanded. "Is this a—a school?"
"I?" He seemed surprised that there could be any doubt about it. "I am a Post-Cubist."
Miss Falconer turned the lorgnette upon him. "Oh, really," she said vaguely. "I fancy I've heard something of that—you're quite new and radical, aren't you?"
"Oh, we're old," he said gently, "very, very old. We have returned to Nature—but not the nature of mere academicians. We paint, not the world of the camera, but the world of the brain. We paint, not the thing you think you see, but the way you think you see it—its vibrations of your inner mentality. To paint the apple ripening on the bough one should reproduce the gentle swelling of the maturing fruit in your perception.... Now, you see, I am not trying to reproduce the precise carving of that door; I do not fix the wavings of that palm. I give you the cerebellic——"
"Quite so," said Miss Falconer, dropping her lorgnette and giving the canvas the fixity of her unobstructed gaze. "It's most interesting," she said, a little faintly. "Are there many of you?"