William said calmly, “It doesn’t matter, except that your beliefs affect your character; they don’t affect facts.”
“In that case, I suppose you wouldn’t have sided with Mr. Sprigger who used to be curate here. He left the Church of England because he couldn’t bring himself to believe the story of John the Baptist and the locusts. He had had a medical training to begin with, as he thought of being a doctor, and he was convinced that some particular part of the locust—I forget which it was exactly—would have been absolutely impossible to digest.”
“There you are!” said William. “Either John digested those locusts or he didn’t. You can’t possibly alter the fact anyhow, and thinking about them was bad for Mr. Sprigger, because it got him into the habit of taking a lawyer’s view of life; arguing for the argument’s sake.”
“I don’t understand what you mean,” said Mrs. Henry coldly.
“Well, a lawyer will argue that a man is guilty or not guilty, whichever way he is paid to, won’t he?” said William. “He doesn’t want to get at the facts; indeed, he refuses to be told sometimes for fear the knowledge should bias his mind. Now Sprigger can’t get at his facts, which is the same as if he wouldn’t, and so he can only be arguing for argument’s sake, and he will never develop his soul in that way.”
“Mr. William,” I was moved to suggest later, “if I put my foot through that picture you have been working at this morning, would you say, ‘what the devil did it matter?’”
“No, certainly not, because it would matter.”
“Of course it would be very annoying,” said Mrs. Henry, “but I can’t see, myself, that it would matter more than that Mr. Sprigger’s beliefs should be undermined. You talk about facts, but Henry said only the other day, that your pictures were misrepresentations of fact.”
“Did he?” said William. “I’ll have to talk that over with him when he comes in. Anyhow, I don’t see what the devil it matters what Henry or anybody else thinks about my pictures so long as they don’t put their feet through them. They are definite creations—facts.”
“Henry says not,” she insisted. Henry came in just then and they began all over again.