"Hush! don't. Come along, though. Gently, man, or they'll see us, and we shall have to talk to the girls." "I'm an ostrich," said the artist; "my head is metaphorically buried in sand. Whatever my pursuers see, I am blind." As it happened a group of people came along, and under their cover the two young men escaped. "He is an awful fool," said Artingale, "but the people believe in him." "Bah! so they will in any lunatic who makes himself fashionably absurd. I'll be reasonable, Harry, though that fellow has half driven me wild with his airs and patronage. He gave me a thumping price for one of my pictures, for he's immensely rich. Then he had the impudence to want me to alter it--the composition of months of hard, honest study--and began to lecture me on art." "From his point of view." "Yes, from his point of view. But as I said, I will be reasonable. There is a deal in this pre-Raphaelitism, and it has done its part in reviving some of the best of the ancient art, and made its mark on our schools of to-day. But there it was not allowed to stop. A pack of idiots--there, I can call them nothing else--go into frantic worship of all the worst portions of old art, and fall down and idolise things that are ugly, ill-coloured, and grotesque." "True, O magnate! and they'll grow worse." "They imitate it in their paintings, drawing impossible trees, landscapes, and houses for backgrounds, and people their foregrounds with resurrections in pigment of creatures that seem as if they had been dead and buried for a month, and clothe them in charnel-house garb." "Bravo! charnel-house garb is good." "Thankye, Polonius junior," said the artist; "I tell you, Harry, I get out of patience with the follies perpetrated under the name of art, to the exclusion of all that is natural and beautiful and pure. Now I ask you, my dear boy, would you like to see a sister of yours dressing up and posing like those two guys of girls?" "Haven't got a sister, worse luck, or you should have her, old fellow." "Thanks. Well, say, then, the woman you loved." "Hush! stop here, old fellow. Here they come." "Who? Those two stained-glass virgins?" "No, no, be quiet; the Mallow girls." There was so much subdued passion in the young man's utterance that the artist glanced sidewise at him, to see that there was an intensity of expression in his eyes quite in keeping with his words, and following the direction of his gaze, he saw that it was fixed upon a barouche, drawn by a fine pair of bays, which champed their bits and flecked their satin coats with foam as they fretted impatiently at the restraint put upon them, and keeping them dawdling in a line of slow-moving carriages going east.