At her knock he ceased singing Il Balen, and cried, ‘Come in!’

‘I beg your pardon, papa; I’m afraid I am interrupting you.’

’Not at all—­not at all, I assure you; come in.  I will have a cigarette; there is nothing like reconsidering one’s work through the smoke of a cigarette.  The most beautiful pictures I have ever seen I have seen in the smoke of a cigarette; nothing can beat those, particularly if you are lying back looking up at a dirty ceiling.’

War and women were the two poles of Arthur’s mind. Cain shielding his Wife from Wild Beasts had often been painted, numberless Bridals of Triermain; and as for the Rape of the Sabines, it seemed as if it could never be sufficiently accomplished.  Opposite the door was a huge design representing Samson and Delilah; opposite the fireplace, Julius Caesar overturning the Altars of the Druids occupied nearly the entire wall.  Nymphs and tigers were scattered in between; canvases were also propped against almost every piece of furniture.

At last Alice’s eyes were suddenly caught by a picture representing three women bathing.  It was a very rough sketch, but, before she had time to examine it, Arthur turned it against the wall.  Why he hid two pictures from her she could not help wondering.  It could not be for propriety’s sake, for there were nudities on every side of her.

Then, lying upon the sofa, he explained how So-and-so had told him, when he was a boy in London, that no one since Michael Angelo had been able to design as he could; how he had modelled a colossal statue of Lucifer before he was sixteen, how he had painted a picture of the Battle of Arbela, forty feet by twenty, before he was eighteen; but that was of no use, the world nowadays only cared for execution, and he could not wait until he had got the bit of ribbon in Delilah’s hair to look exactly like silk.

Alice listened to her father babbling, her heart and her mind at variance.  A want of knowledge of painting might blind her to the effects of his pictures (there was in them all a certain crude merit of design), but it was impossible not to see that they were lacking in something, in what she could not say, having no knowledge of painting.  Nor was she sure that her father believed in his pictures, though he had just declared they had all the beauties of Raphael and other beauties besides.  He had a trick of never appearing to thoroughly believe in them and in himself.  She listened interested and amused, not knowing how to take him.  She had been away at school for nearly ten years, coming home for rare holidays, and was, therefore, without any real knowledge of her parents.  She understood her father even less than her mother; but she was certain that if he were not a great genius he might have been one, and she resolved to find out Lord Dungory’s opinions on her father.  But the opportunity for five minutes quiet chat behind her mother’s back did not present itself.  As soon as he arrived her mother sent her out of the room on some pretext more or less valid, and at the end of the week the gowns that had been ordered in Dublin arrived:  ecstasy consumed the house, and she heard him say that he would give a great dinner-party to show them off.