"Yes, you are right. It is painting that expresses all that is beautiful in the world." "Especially Philip's art," said Lorimer, seeming to grasp Dora's meaning from the warmth with which she spoke. "You paint nature, my dear friend, flowers, portraits ... you do not inflict the nude upon us, as do so many of your brothers in art, who show themselves but poor imitators of the French school, _servum pecus_." "But nature is surely always beautiful, wherever she is found," said Dora. "The ideal, yes," said Lorimer; "but it is the realistic method of treatment, in most pictures, that displeases me. Perhaps I am a little puritanical; but what can you expect? I'm English!" "But there is no ideal nature, there is only true nature," said Dora. "Call it realism, if you wish: what is real is true, and what is true is beautiful." "My dear Lorimer," exclaimed Philip, "if you are going to argue out that subject with Dora, you are lost, I warn you. You will get the worst of it." "Well, you will admit this much, I suppose," said Dora, "that the models chosen are generally beautiful. English models are even more than beautiful, they are mostly pure in form." "Quite so, but no artist has a right to expose a woman's nude figure to the public gaze. In sculpture it may be permissible,--the cold purity of the marble saves everything,--but never in painting." "Shake up the Englishman," said Dora, laughing, "and the Puritan rises to the surface. I thought you were artistic, my dear friend. One may forgive a Puritan, but a _pruritan_, excuse the word. Oh!... I have met people who only saw in the _Venus de Milo_ a woman with no clothes on. Poor Venus! I wish she could grow a pair of arms and hands to box the ears of such Philistines. Of course, I must say, these people were not of our society." "Well, call me prejudiced if you will; but I hate to see woman robbed of her modesty ... and of her clothes, for the edification of a profane public, especially a public as inartistic as our English one. Your remark about the _Venus de Milo_ proves that I am right. In France it is another matter. The public understands. It knows that such and such a picture is beautiful, and why it is beautiful. Even the workmen over there have been visitors of picture galleries from generation to generation, and I have heard some, at the Louvre and the Luxembourg, making criticisms of pictures that they looked at, criticisms which proved to me that they had more true appreciation of painting than the fashionable crowd that goes to the Royal Academy on private view day. No, I say, the nude in France, if you will; but in England, Heaven preserve us from it!" "And yet," said Dora, in a calmer tone of voice, "the novelists and dramatists of to-day, for the most part, do exactly the same thing."