“Excellently put,” said Boden, his hat on the back of his head, his eyes beginning to shine.  “Do men gather grapes off thistles?”

“Constantly.  There is no relation whatever between art and morality.”  Delorme smoked pugnaciously.  “The greater the artist, generally speaking, the worse the man.”

“I say!  Really as bad as that?”

Boden waved a languid hand toward the smoke-wreathed phantom of Delorme.  The circle round the two laughed, languidly also, for it was almost too hot laugh.  The circle consisted of Victoria, Gerald Tatham, Mrs. Manisty, and Colonel Barton, who had reappeared at luncheon, in order to urge Tatham to see Faversham as soon as possible on certain local affairs.

“Oh!  I give you my head in a charger,” said Delorme, not without heat.  “For you, Burne-Jones is ‘pure’ and I am ‘decadent’; because he paints anemic knights in sham armour and I paint what I see.”

“The one absolutely fatal course!  Don’t you agree?”

Boden turned smiling to Mrs. Manisty, of whose lovely head and soft eyes he was conscious through all the chatter.

The eyes responded.

“What do we see?” she said, with her shy smile.  “Surely we only see what we think—­or dream!”

“True!” cried Delorme; “but a painter thinks in paint.”

“There you go,” said Boden, “with your esoteric stuff.  All your great painters have thought and felt with the multitude—­painted for the multitude.”

“Never.”  The painter jerked away his cigar, and sat up.  “The multitude is a brute beast!”

“A just beast,” murmured Boden.

“Anything but!” said the painter.  “But you know my views.  In every generation, so far as art is concerned, there are about thirty men who matter—­in all the world!”

“Artists?” The voice was Lucy Manisty’s.

“Good heavens, no!  Artists—­and judges—­together.  The gate of art is a deal straiter than the gate of Heaven.”

Boden caught Victoria’s laugh.

“Let him alone,” he said, indulgently.  “His is the only aristocracy I can stand—­with apologies to my hostess.”

“Oh, we’re done for,” said Victoria, quietly.

Boden turned a humorous eye, first to the great house basking in the sunshine, then to his hostess.

“Not yet.  But you’re doomed.  As the old Yorkshireman said to his son, when they were watching the triumphs of a lion-tamer in the travelling menagerie—­that ‘genelman’s to be wooried soom day.’  When the real Armageddon comes, it’ll not find you in possession. You’ll have gone down long before.”

“Really?  Then who will be in possession?” asked Gerald Tatham, a very perceptible sneer in his disagreeable voice.  He disliked Boden as one of “the infernal Radicals” whom Victoria would inflict on the sacred precincts of Duddon, but he was generally afraid of him in conversation.

“Merely the rich”—­the tone was still nonchalant—­“the Haves against the Haven’ts.  No nonsense left, by that time, about ‘blood’ and ‘family.’  Society will have dropped all those little trimmings and embroideries.  We shall have come to the naked fundamental things.”