"Oh, yes, I've forgiven the Fair long ago." She laughed, and he laughed with her.
"It's best not to keep a grudge against a defeat, I suppose. If we do, it won't help us. I've had my quarrel with the Pymantoning County Fair, too; but it wasn't with the Fine Arts Committee."
"No, I didn't suppose you wanted to exhibit anything there," said Cornelia.
"Why, I don't know. It might be a very good thing for me. Why not? I'd like to exhibit this very picture there. It's an impression—not just what I'd do, now—of the trotting-match I saw there that day."
"Yes," said Cornelia, letting her eyes fall, "Mrs. Burton said you had painted it, or you were going to."
"Well, I did," said Ludlow, "and nobody seemed to know what I was after. I wonder if they would in Pymantoning! But what I wanted to ask was that you would try to look at it from the Pymantoning point of view. I hope you haven't lost that yet?"
"Well, I haven't been away such a great while," said Cornelia, smiling.
"No; but still, one sophisticates in New York very soon. I'll tell you what I've got a notion of! Well, it's all very much in the air, yet, but so far as I've thought it out, it's the relation of our art to our life. It sounds rather boring, I know, and I suppose I'm a bit of a theorist; I always was. It's easy enough to prove to the few that our life is full of poetry and picturesqueness; but can I prove it to the many? Can the people themselves be made to see it and feel it? That's the question. Can they be interested in a picture—a real work of art that asserts itself in a good way? Can they be taught to care for my impression of the trotting-match at the Pymantoning County Fair, as much as they would for a chromo of the same thing, and be made to feel that there was something more in it perhaps?"
He sat fronting her, with his head down over the hat he held between his hands; now he lifted his face and looked into hers. She smiled at his earnestness, and for a little instant felt herself older and wiser in her practicality.
"You might send it out to the next County Fair, and see."