'Some do; I don't. Conventions mean nothing to me, as you perceive, or I should have a companion here to play propriety. But like you, perhaps, I am Romantic. I believe in the grand style. I have ideas as to how men should treat me. I can read Octave Feuillet. I have a terrible weakness for those cavaliers of his. And garbage makes me ill. So I avoid the "Trois Rats."'
She fell silent, resting her little chin on her hand. Then with a sudden sly smile she bent forward and looked him in the eyes.
'Are you pious, Monsieur, like all the English? There is some religion left in your country, isn't there?'
'Yes, certainly,' he admitted, 'there was a good deal.'
Then, hesitating, he described his own early reading of Voltaire, watching its effect upon her, afraid lest here too he should say something fatuous, behind the time, as he seemed to have been doing all through.
'Voltaire!'—she shrugged her little shoulders—'Voltaire to me is just an old perruque—a prating philanthropical person who talked about le bon Dieu, and wrote just what every bourgeois can understand. If he had had his will and swept away the clergy and the Church, how many fine subjects we artists should have lost!'
He sat helplessly staring at her. She enjoyed his perplexity a minute; then she returned to the charge.
'Well, my credo is very short. Its first article is art—and its second is art—and its third is art!'
Her words excited her. The delicate colour flushed into her cheek. She flung her head back and looked straight before her with half-shut eyes.
'Yes—I believe in art—and expression—and colour—and le vrai. Velazquez is my God, and—and he has too many prophets to mention! I was devout once for three months—since then I have never had as much faith of the Church sort as would lie on a ten-sous piece. But'—with a sudden whimsical change of voice—'I am as credulous as a Breton fisherman, and as superstitious as a gipsy! Wait and see. Will you look at my pictures?'