abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your
"spirit of beauty" simply means certain shapes and colours which
please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.'

'Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!' said
Claude, laughing.

'I don't care sixpence now for the ideal! I want not beauty, but
some beautiful thing--a woman perhaps,' and he sighed. 'But at
least a person--a living, loving person--all lovely itself, and
giving loveliness to all things! If I must have an ideal, let it
be, for mercy's sake, a realised one.'

Claude opened his sketch-book.

'We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.
But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these
degenerate days--the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would
be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.
Look at them! Honoria the dark--symbolic of passionate depth;
Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light! Oh, that I were a
Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate
pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in
this piecemeal world!'

'You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose,
from both beauties?'

'I hope so, for my own sake. There is no path left to immortality,
or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.'