"Perhaps presently, when they are painted as I hope to paint them. This is
only a rough bit of work to occupy my hand and eye while I am learning the
gorse. Men who paint seriously have to learn trees and blossoms just as
they have to learn faces. And we are never satisfied. When I have painted
this gorse, with its thorns and buds, I shall sigh for more truth. I cannot
paint the soul of each little yellow flower that opens to the sun; I cannot
paint the sunny smell that is sweet in our nostrils now. God's gorse scents
the air; mine will only smell of fat oil. What shall I do?"

"I dunnaw."

"No more does anybody. It can't be helped. But I must try my best and make
it real--each spike, as I see it--the dead gray ones on the ground and the
live green ones on the tree, and the baby ones and the old gray-pointed
ones, which have seen their best days and will presently die and fall--I
must paint them all, Joan."

She laughed.

"Don't laugh," he said, very seriously. "Only an artist would laugh at me,
not you who love Nature. There lives a great painter, Joan, who paints
pictures that nobody else in the wide world can paint. He is growing old,
but he is not too old to take trouble still. Once, when he was a young man,
he drew a lemon-tree far away in Italy. It was only a little lemon-tree,
but the artist rose morning after morning and drew it leaf by leaf, twig by
twig, until every leaf and bud and lemon and bough had appeared. It was not
labored and false; it was grand because it was true: a joy forever; work
Old Masters had loved; full of distinction and power and patience almost
Oriental. A thing, Joan Tregenza, worth a wilderness of 'harmonies' and
'impressions,' 'nocturnes' and 'notes,' smudges and audacities. But I