“Huh?” said Stibo.

“Anything that produces a mental obsession, une idee fixe, is a form of madness,” said Quinny, rapidly.  “A person in love sees only one face, hears only one voice; at the base of the brain only one thought is constantly drumming.  Physically such a condition is a narcotic; mentally it is a form of madness that in the beneficent state is powerfully hypnotic.”

At this deft disentanglement of a complicated idea, Rankin, who, like the professional juryman, wagged his head in agreement with each speaker and was convinced by the most violent, gazed upon Quinny with absolute adoration.

“We were speaking of woman,” said Towsey, gruffly, who pronounced the sex with a peculiar staccato sound.

“This little ABC introduction,” said Quinny, pleasantly, “is necessary to understand the relation a woman plays to the artist.  It is not the woman he seeks, but the hypnotic influence which the woman can exert on his faculties if she is able to inspire him with a passion.”

“Precisely why he marries,” said De Gollyer.

“Precisely,” said Quinny, who, having seized the argument by chance, was pleasantly surprised to find that he was going to convince himself.  “But here is the great distinction:  to be an inspiration, a woman should always represent to the artist a form of the unattainable.  It is the search for something beyond him that makes him challenge the stars, and all that sort of rot, you know.”

“The tragedy of life,” said Rankin, sententiously, “is that one woman cannot mean all things to one man all the time.”

It was a phrase which he had heard the night before, and which he flung off casually with an air of spontaneity, twisting the old Spanish ring on his bony, white fingers, which he held invariably in front of his long, sliding nose.

“Thank you, I said that about the year 1907,” said Quinny, while Steingall gasped and nudged Towsey.  “That is the tragedy of life, not the tragedy of art, two very different things.  An artist has need of ten, fifteen, twenty women, according to the multiplicity of his ideas.  He should be always violently in love or violently reacting.”

“And the wife?” said De Gollyer.  “Has she any influence?”

“My dear fellow, the greatest.  Without a wife, an artist falls a prey to the inspiration of the moment—­condemned to it; and as he is not an analyst, he ends by imagining he really is in love.  Take portrait-painting.  Charming lady sits for portrait, painter takes up his brushes, arranges his palette, seeks inspiration,—­what is below the surface?—­something intangible to divine, seize, and affix to his canvas.  He seeks to know the soul; he seeks how?  As a man in love seeks, naturally.  The more he imagines himself in love, the more completely does the idea obsess him from morning to night—­plain as the nose on your face.  Only there are other portraits to paint.  Enter the wife.”