“Love of Art did n't bring me here, I assure you,” replied Norma.
“Then what did?”
Jimmie in his guilelessness had an uncomfortable way of posing fundamental questions. In that respect he was like a child. Norma smiled in silent contemplation of the real object of their visit. At first her mother had tossed the cards of invitation into the waste-paper basket. It was advertising impudence on the part of the painter man, whom she had met but once, to take her name in vain on the back of an envelope. Then hearing accidentally that the painter man had painted the portraits of many high-born ladies, including that of the Duchess of Wiltshire, and that the Duchess of Wiltshire herself—their own duchess, who gave Mrs. Hardacre the tip of her finger to shake and sometimes the tip of a rasping tongue to meditate upon, whom Mrs. Hardacre had tried any time these ten years to net for Heddon Court, their place in the country—had graciously promised to attend the Private View, in her character of Lady Patroness-in-Chief of the painter man, Mrs. Hardacre had hurried home and had set the servants' hall agog in search of the cards. Eventually they had been discovered in the dust-bin, and she had spent half an hour in cleansing them with bread-crumbs, much to Norma's sardonic amusement. The duchess not having yet arrived, Mrs. Hardacre had fallen back upon the deaf Dowager Countess of Solway, who was discoursing to her in a loud voice on her late husband's method of breeding prize pigs. Norma had broken away from this exhilarating lecture to greet Jimmie.
He kept his eager eyes upon her, still waiting for an answer to his question:
“What did?”
Norma, fairly quick-witted, indicated the walls with a little comprehensive gesture.
“Do you call this simpering, uninspired stuff Art?” she said, begging the question.
“Oh, it's not that,” cried Jimmie, falling into the trap. “It's really very good of its kind. Amazingly clever. Of course it's not highly finished. It's impressionistic. Look at that sweeping line from the throat all the way down to the hem of the skirt,” indicating the picture in front of them and following the curve, painter fashion, with bent-back thumb; “how many of your fellows in the Academy could get that so clean and true?”
“I have just met Mr. Porteous, who said he could n't stay any longer because such quackery made him sick,” said Norma.
Jimmie glanced round the walls. Porteous, the Royal Academician, was right. The colour was thin, the modelling flat, the drawing tricky, the invention poor. A dull soullessness ran through the range of full-length portraits of women. He realised, with some distress, the clever insincerity of the painting; but he had known Foljambe, the author of these coloured crimes, as a fellow-student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and having come to see his work for the first time, could not bear to judge harshly. It was characteristic of him to expatiate on the only merit the work possessed.