“Just a confused mass of rubbish.  It was as if an animal painter should compose a group and you could not tell whether it was made up of sheep or rabbits or dogs or foxes or griffins.”

“So you want things picked out like a photograph?”

“I beg your pardon, I want nature.  You cannot give character to a bit of ground in a landscape unless you know the characters of its details.  A man is no more fit to paint a landscape than a cage of monkeys, unless he knows the language of the nature he is dealing with down to the alphabet.  The Japanese know it so well that they are not bothered with minutia, but give you character.”

“And you think that science is an aid to art?”

“Yes, if there is genius to transform it into art.  You must know the intimate habits of anything you paint or write about.  You cannot even caricature without that.  They talk now about Dickens being just a caricaturist.  He couldn’t have been that if he hadn’t known the things he caricatured.  That is the reason there is so little good caricature.”

“Isn’t your idea of painting rather anatomical?” Philip ventured to ask.

“Do you think that if Raphael had known nothing of anatomy the world would have accepted his Sistine Madonna for the woman she is?” was the retort.

“I see it is interesting,” said Philip, shifting his ground again, “but what is the real good of all these botanical names and classifications?”

Miss McDonald gave a weary sigh.  “Well, you must put things in order.  You studied philology in Germany?  The chief end of that is to trace the development, migration, civilization of the human race.  To trace the distribution of plants is another way to find out about the race.  But let that go.  Don’t you think that I get more pleasure in looking at all the growing things we see, as we sit here, than you do in seeing them and knowing as little about them as you pretend to?”

Philip said that he could not analyze the degree of pleasure in such things, but he seemed to take his ignorance very lightly.  What interested him in all this talk was that, in discovering the mind of the governess, he was getting nearer to the mind of her pupil.  And finally he asked (and Miss McDonald smiled, for she knew what this conversation, like all others with him, must ultimately come to): 

“Does the Mavick family also take to botany?”

“Oh yes.  Mrs. Mavick is intimate with all the florists in New York.  And Miss Evelyn, when I take home these specimens, will analyze them and tell all about them.  She is very sharp about such things.  You must have noticed that she likes to be accurate?”

“But she is fond of poetry.”

“Yes, of poetry that she understands.  She has not much of the emotional vagueness of many young girls.”

All this was very delightful for Philip, and for a long time, on one pretext or another, he kept the conversation revolving about this point.  He fancied he was very deep in doing this.  To his interlocutor he was, however, very transparent.  And the young man would have been surprised and flattered if he had known how much her indulgence of him in this talk was due to her genuine liking for him.