He began to talk of some pictures he had been studying in the Palace that day—Nattiers, Rigauds, Drouais—examples of that happy, sensuous, confident art, produced by a society that knew no doubts of itself, which not to have enjoyed—so the survivors of it thought—was to be for ever ignorant of what the charm of life might be.
Fenwick spoke of it with envy and astonishment. The pleasure of it had penetrated him, its gay, perpetual festa—as compared with the strain of thought and conscience under which the modern lives.
'It gives me a perfect hunger for fine clothes, and jewels, and masquerades—and "fêtes de nuit"—and every sort of theatricality and expense! Nature has sent us starvelings on the scene a hundred years late. We are like children in the rain, flattening our noses against a ballroom window.'
'There were plenty of them then,' said Eugénie. 'But they broke in and sacked the ballroom.'
'Yes. What folly!' he said, bitterly. 'We are all still groping among the ruins.'
'No, no! Build a new Palace of Beauty—and bring everybody in—out of the rain.'
'Ridiculous!' he declared, with sparkling eyes. Art and pleasure were only for the few. Try and spread them, make current coin of them, and they vanished like fairy gold.
'So only the artist may be happy?'
'The artist is never happy!' he said, roughly. 'But the few people who appreciate him and rob him, enjoy themselves. By the way, I took one of your ideas this morning, and made a sketch of it. I haven't noted a composition of any sort for weeks—except for this beastly play. It came to me while we talked.'
'Ah!' Her face, turned to him, received the news with a shrinking pleasure.