“It is very lovely,” he said, rather more because he thought it was the thing he ought to say than from any other cause. “Yes,” said Sara; “we are very proud of our Claude; but I should like to know why active men like papa should like those sort of pictures; he prefers landscapes to every thing else--whereas they make me impatient. I want something that lives and breathes. I like pictures of life--not that one everlasting line of light fixed down upon the canvas with no possibility of change.” “I don’t know much about pictures,” said Powys--“but yet--don’t you think it is less natural still to see one everlasting attitude--like that, for instance, on the other wall? people don’t keep doing one particular thing all their lives.” “I should like to be a policeman and tell them to move on,” said Sara. “That woman there, who is giving the bread to the beggar--she has been the vexation of my life; why can’t she give it and have done with it? I think I hate pictures--I don’t see what we want with them. I always want to know what happened next.” “But nothing need happen at all here,” said Powys, with unconscious comprehension, turning to the Claude again. He was a little out of his depth, and not used to this kind of talk, but more and more it was going to his head, and that intoxication carried him on. “That is the worst of all,” said Sara. “Why doesn’t there come a storm?--what is the good of every thing always being the same? That was what I meant down stairs when you pretended you did not understand.” What was the poor young fellow to say? He was penetrated to his very heart by the sweet poison of this unprecedented flattery--for it was flattery, though Sara meant nothing more than the freemasonry of youth. She had forgotten he was a clerk, standing there before the Claude; she had even forgotten her own horror at the discovery that he was a man. He was young, like herself, willing to follow her lead, and he “understood;” which after all, though Sara was not particularly wise, is the true test of social capabilities. He did know what she meant, though in that one case he had not responded; and Sara, like every body else of quick intelligence and rapid mind, met with a great many people who stared and did not know what she meant. This was why she did the stranger the honor of a half reproach;--it brought the poor youth’s intoxication to its height. “But I don’t think you understand,” he said, ruefully, apologetically, pathetically, laying himself down at her feet as it were, to be trod upon if she pleased. “You don’t know how hard it is to be poor; so long as it was only one’s self, perhaps, or so long as it was mere hardship; but there is worse than that; you have to feel yourself mean and sordid--you have to do shabby things. You have to put yourself under galling obligations; but I ought not to speak to you like this--that is what it really is to be poor.”