"It strikes me," said Frida, as Durant established himself beside her again, "that it's you artists whose devotion to Nature is--well--not altogether disinterested." "Manby's affection seems to be pretty sincere; it stands the test of seasickness." "Oh, Mr. Manby doesn't really care very much for nature or for art either." "What does he try to paint pictures for, then?" "He tries to paint them for a living, for himself and the little girls." And Frida looked tenderly at Mr. Manby as she spoke. At that moment Durant hated Mr. Manby with a deadly hatred. He had gone so far as to find a malignant satisfaction in the thought that Mr. Manby's pictures were bad, when he remembered that Frida had a weakness for bad pictures. Art did not appeal to Frida. She talked about Paris and Florence and Rome without a word of the Louvre or the Uffizi Gallery or the Vatican. She didn't care a rap about Raphael or Rubens, but she hampered herself with Manbys. "Is there a Mrs. Manby?" he asked gloomily. "No. Mrs. Manby died last year." "H'mph! Poor devil! Lucky for her, though." Frida ignored the implication. "To go back to the point we were discussing. If you were honest you'd own that you only care for nature because you can make pictures out of it. Now I, on the contrary, have no ulterior motives; I don't want to make anything out of it." "I wasn't talking about nature. I want to know what you are going to make of your life." "There you are again. Why should I make anything of it? You talk as if life were so much raw material to be worked into something that it isn't. To my mind it's beautiful enough as it is. I should spoil it if I tried to make anything of it." He looked at her and he understood. He was a man of talent, some said of genius, but in her there was something greater than that; it was the genius of temperament, an infinite capacity for taking pleasures. To her life was more than mere raw material, it came finished to her hands, because it had lived a long life in her soul. Her dream had tallied. Beside that rich creative impulse, that divine imagination of hers, his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a copyist, the plagiarist of nature. He looked up to where Mr. Manby sat smiling over his sketching block, Mr. Manby, surrounded by his admiring family. Mr. Manby did not see them; he was wrapped in his dream, absorbed in his talent with all its innocent enormities. He at any rate had no misgivings. The little girls, Eileen and Ermyntrude, played about him; they played with blocks and life-buoys and cables, they jumped over coils of rope, they spun round to leeward till the wind wound their faces in their long hair, they ran for'ard, shrieking with happy laughter as they were caught by the showers of spray flung from the yacht's bows. Frida's eyes followed them, and Durant's eyes followed Frida's. "They are seeing the world, too, it seems."