"Anything but!" said the painter. "But you know my views. In every generation, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men who matter—in all the world!"
"Artists?" The voice was Lucy Manisty's.
"Good heavens, no! Artists—and judges—together. The gate of art is a deal straiter than the gate of Heaven."
Boden caught Victoria's laugh.
"Let him alone," he said, indulgently. "His is the only aristocracy I can stand—with apologies to my hostess."
"Oh, we're done for," said Victoria, quietly.
Boden turned a humorous eye, first to the great house basking in the sunshine, then to his hostess.
"Not yet. But you're doomed. As the old Yorkshireman said to his son, when they were watching the triumphs of a lion-tamer in the travelling menagerie—that 'genelman's to be wooried soom day.' When the real Armageddon comes, it'll not find you in possession. You'll have gone down long before."
"Really? Then who will be in possession?" asked Gerald Tatham, a very perceptible sneer in his disagreeable voice. He disliked Boden as one of "the infernal Radicals" whom Victoria would inflict on the sacred precincts of Duddon, but he was generally afraid of him in conversation.
"Merely the rich"—the tone was still nonchalant—"the Haves against the
Haven'ts. No nonsense left, by that time, about 'blood' and 'family.'
Society will have dropped all those little trimmings and embroideries.
We shall have come to the naked fundamental things."