"Can I?" Neville turned and gazed at Querida, gray eyes clear in their searching inquiry. Then he laughed a little and looked out over the sunny landscape. Querida's olive cheeks had reddened a trifle. Neville said: "What _is_ the trouble with my work, anyway? Is it what some of you fellows say?" Querida did not pretend to misunderstand: "You're really a great painter, Neville. And you know it. Must you have _everything_?" "Well--I'm going after it." "Surely--surely. I, also. God knows my work lacks many, many things--" "But it doesn't lack that one essential which mine lacks. _What_ is it?" Querida laughed: "I can't explain. For me--your Byzantine canvas--there is in it something not intimate--" "Austere?" "Yes--even in those divine and lovely throngs. There is, perhaps, an aloofness--even a self-denial--" He laughed again: "I deny myself nothing--on canvas--even I have the audacity to try to draw as you do!" Neville sat thinking, watching the landscape speed away on either side in a running riot of green. "Self-denial--too much of it--separates you from your kind," said Querida. "The solitary fasters are never personally pleasant; hermits are the world's public admiration and private abomination. Oh, the good world dearly loves to rub elbows with a talented sinner and patronise him and sentimentalise over him--one whose miracles don't hurt their eyes enough to blind them to the pleasant discovery that his halo is tarnished in spots and needs polishing, and that there's a patch on the seat of his carefully creased toga." Neville laughed. Presently he said: "Until recently I've cherished theories. One of 'em was to subordinate everything in life to the enjoyment of a single pleasure--the pleasure of work.... I guess experience is putting that theory on the blink." "Surely. You might as well make an entire meal of one favourite dish. For a day you could stand it, even like it, perhaps. After that--" he shrugged. "But--I'd _rather_ spend my time painting--if I could stand the diet." "Would you? I don't know what I'd rather do. I like almost everything. It makes me paint better to talk to a pretty woman, for example. To kiss her inspires a masterpiece." "Does it?" said Neville, thoughtfully. "Of course. A week or two of motoring--riding, dancing, white flannel idleness--all these I adore. And," tapping his carefully pinned lilac tie--"inside of me I know that every pleasant experience, every pleasure I offer myself, is going to make me a better painter!" "Experience," repeated the other. "By all means and every means--experience in pleasure, in idleness, in love, in sorrow--but experience!--always experience, by hook or by crook, and at any cost. That is the main idea, Neville--_my_ main idea--like the luscious agglomeration of juicy green things which that cow is eating; they all go to make good milk. Bah!--that's a stupid simile," he added, reddening. Neville laughed. Presently he pointed across the meadows.