Querida did not pretend to misunderstand:
"You're really a great painter, Neville. And you know it. Must you have everything?"
"Well—I'm going after it."
"Surely—surely. I, also. God knows my work lacks many, many things—"
"But it doesn't lack that one essential which mine lacks. What is it?"
Querida laughed: "I can't explain. For me—your Byzantine canvas—there is in it something not intimate—"
"Austere?"
"Yes—even in those divine and lovely throngs. There is, perhaps, an aloofness—even a self-denial—" He laughed again: "I deny myself nothing—on canvas—even I have the audacity to try to draw as you do!"
Neville sat thinking, watching the landscape speed away on either side in a running riot of green.
"Self-denial—too much of it—separates you from your kind," said Querida. "The solitary fasters are never personally pleasant; hermits are the world's public admiration and private abomination. Oh, the good world dearly loves to rub elbows with a talented sinner and patronise him and sentimentalise over him—one whose miracles don't hurt their eyes enough to blind them to the pleasant discovery that his halo is tarnished in spots and needs polishing, and that there's a patch on the seat of his carefully creased toga."