"Not yet. She doesn't know enough of life, even if she knew enough of art. She merely painted another girl."
"That is true," said Mrs. Westley with a sigh. She added impersonally; "But if people only kept to what they knew, and didn't do what they divined, there would be very little art or literature left, it seems to me."
"Well, perhaps the less the better." said Ludlow, with a smile for the absurdity he was reduced to. "What was left would certainty be the best."
He felt as if his praise of Cornelia were somehow retrieval; as if it would avail where he seemed otherwise so helpless, and would bring them together on the old terms again. There was, indeed, nothing explicit in their alienation, and when he saw Cornelia at Mrs. Westley's first Thursday, he made his way to her at once, and asked her if she would give him some tea, with the effect of having had a cup from her the day before. He did not know whether to be pleased or not that she treated their meeting as something uneventful, too, and made a little joke about remembering that he liked his tea without sugar.
"I wasn't aware that you knew that," he said.
"Oh, yes; that is the way Charmian always made it for you; and sometimes I made it."
"To be sure. It seems a great while ago. How are you getting on with your picture?"
"I'm not getting on," said Cornelia, and she turned aside to make a cup of tea for an old gentleman, who confessed that he liked a spoonful of rum in his. General Westley had brought him up and presented him, and he remained chatting with Cornelia, apparently in the fatuity that if he talked trivially to her he would be the same as a young man. Ludlow stayed, too, and when the old gentleman got away, he said, the same as if there had been no interruption, "Why aren't you getting on?"
"Because I'm not doing anything to it."
"You ought to. I told you what Wetmore said of it."