It wasn’t in them to hustle:  they felt no call for it, but just sat and painted and took their meals regular.  Now that spacious holy sauntering don’t figure in my bill.  When I get hold of a notion—­same as this Infant Shakespeare, f’r instance—­it’s apt to take hold on me as a mighty fine proposition; and then, before I can slap it on canvas, the thing’s gone, faded, extinct, like a sunset.”  He paused and snapped his fingers expressively.  “I paint like Hades, but it beats me by a head every time.”

—­“And what’s the reason?  I’m fickle, you say.  But that’s my temperament, and before a man kicks against that he ought to be clear whether it’s original sin or the outcome of his environment.  See what I mean?”

Arthur Miles was too truthful to say that he did.  Indeed, he understood next to nothing of this harangue.  But the young American’s manner, so eager, so boyishly confidential, set him at his ease; while beneath this voluble flow of talk there moved a deeper current for which, all unconsciously, the child’s spirit thirsted.  He did not realise this at all, but his eyes shone while he listened.

“I’ll put it this way:  We’re in the twentieth century.  Between the old masters and us something has happened.  What?  Why Speed, sir—­modern civilisation has discovered Speed.  Railways—­telegraphs—­’phones—­ elevators—­automobiles—­Atlantic records.  These inventions, sir”—­here as will happen to Americans when they philosophise, Mr. Jessup slipped into an oratorical style—­“have altered man’s whole environment.  Velasquez, sir, was a great artist, and Velasquez could paint, in his day, to beat the band.  But I argue that, if you resurrected Velasquez to-day, he’d have to alter his outlook, and everything along with it, right away down to his brush-work.  And I go on to argue that if I can’t paint like Velasquez—­which is a cold fact—­it’s equally a fact that, if I could, I oughtn’t.  Speed, sir:  that’s the great proposition—­the principles of Speed as applied to the Fine Arts—­”

Here he glanced towards the clearing between the willows, where at this moment Tilda reappeared in a hurry, followed—­at a sedater pace—­by a young woman in a pale blue sunbonnet.

“Oh, Arthur Miles, it’s just splendid!” she announced, waving a letter in her hand.  And with that, noting the boy’s attitude, she checked herself and stared suspiciously from him to the artist.  “Wot yer doin’ to ’im?” she demanded.

“Painting his portrait.”

“Then you didn’t ought, an’ ’e’d no business to allow it!”

She stepped to the canvas, examined it quickly, anxiously, then with a puzzled frown that seemed to relax in a sigh of relief—­

“Well, it don’t seem as you’ve done much ’arm as yet.  But all the same, you didn’t ought.”

“I want to know what’s splendid?” the artist inquired, looking from her to the girl in the sun-bonnet, who blushed rosily.