"Yes, Lady Dover," he was saying, "I only touched the canvas a dozen times to-day, yet I have done, as I said, a full day's work. _C'est le dernier pas qui coûte_; it is on those last touches that the whole thing depends. I knew when I went out this morning that I had not got what I meant; I knew, too, that it was nearly there, and it is that "nearly" that is yet so far. There was the shadow of a cloud, if you remember, over the bank of gorse." "Oh, I thought that shadow was quite perfect," said Lady Dover. "I hope you have not touched it." "It has gone," said Mr. Dennison, as if announcing the death of a near relation who had left him money, for though his voice was mournful, there was a hint of something comfortable coming. "Gone. I saw I could not do it so as to make it true." He looked up at this tragic announcement and caught Evelyn's eye. "Mr. Dundas, I am sure, will bear me out," he said. "We poor artists are bound, however it limits us, to put down only what we know is true. We are not poets but chroniclers." "Oh, Evelyn, and you've been telling such lies about me," said Madge, from the other side. "Chroniclers," resumed Mr. Dennison. "When we feel sure we are right we record our impression. But unless that certainty of vision comes to us, we must be honest, we must not attempt a vague impression merely. Is it not so?" Evelyn's face looked extraordinarily vital and boyish as he leaned forward. "Oh, I don't agree in the least," he said. "I think we always ought to try to record just those suggestions--those vaguenesses--which you say you leave out. Look at 'La Gioconda.' What did Andrea mean us to think about that sphinx? I don't know, nor do you. And, what is more certain than even that, nor did he know. Did he mean what Walter Pater said he meant? It again is quite certain he did not. No, I think every picture ought to ask an unanswerable riddle, any picture, that is to say, which is a picture at all, a riddle like 'Which came first, the hen or the egg?' Surely anything obvious is not worth painting at all." Mr. Dennison had clearly not thought of things in this light. It was not thus that the ordnance map of Sutherland would be made. "An amusing paradox," he said. "Nobody is to know anything about a picture, especially the man who painted it. Is that correct?" His tone had something slightly nettled about it, and Evelyn's imperturbable good humour and gaiety might perhaps represent the indifference of the nettles towards the hand they had stung. "Yes, just that," he said. "Take any of the arts. Surely it is because a play has a hundred interpretations that it is worth seeing, and because a hundred different people will experience a hundred different emotions that an opera is worth listening to. And the very fact that when we hear 'The jolly roast beef of old England' we are all irresistibly reminded of the jolly roast beef of old England shows that it is a bad tune." Mr. Dennison waved his hand in a sketchy manner.