“Yes,” said Fort, “she’d make a wonderful picture.  I’m not a judge of Art, but I can see that.”

The painter smiled, and went on in his rapid French: 

“She has youth and age all at once—­that is rare.  Her father is an interesting man, too; I am trying to paint him; he is very difficult.  He sits lost in some kind of vacancy of his own; a man whose soul has gone before him somewhere, like that of his Church, escaped from this age of machines, leaving its body behind—­is it not?  He is so kind; a saint, I think.  The other clergymen I see passing in the street are not at all like him; they look buttoned-up and busy, with faces of men who might be schoolmasters or lawyers, or even soldiers—­men of this world.  Do you know this, monsieur—­it is ironical, but it is true, I think a man cannot be a successful priest unless he is a man of this world.  I do not see any with that look of Monsieur Pierson, a little tortured within, and not quite present.  He is half an artist, really a lover of music, that man.  I am painting him at the piano; when he is playing his face is alive, but even then, so far away.  To me, monsieur, he is exactly like a beautiful church which knows it is being deserted.  I find him pathetic.  Je suis socialiste, but I have always an aesthetic admiration for that old Church, which held its children by simple emotion.  The times have changed; it can no longer hold them so; it stands in the dusk, with its spire to a heaven which exists no more, its bells, still beautiful but out of tune with the music of the streets.  It is something of that which I wish to get into my picture of Monsieur Pierson; and sapristi! it is difficult!” Fort grunted assent.  So far as he could make out the painter’s words, it seemed to him a large order.

“To do it, you see,” went on the painter, “one should have the proper background—­these currents of modern life and modern types, passing him and leaving him untouched.  There is no illusion, and no dreaming, in modern life.  Look at this street.  La, la!”

In the darkened Strand, hundreds of khaki-clad figures and girls were streaming by, and all their voices had a hard, half-jovial vulgarity.  The motor-cabs and buses pushed along remorselessly; newspaper-sellers muttered their ceaseless invitations.  Again the painter made his gesture of despair:  “How am I to get into my picture this modern life, which washes round him as round that church, there, standing in the middle of the street?  See how the currents sweep round it, as if to wash it away; yet it stands, seeming not to see them.  If I were a phantasist, it would be easy enough:  but to be a phantasist is too simple for me—­those romantic gentlemen bring what they like from anywhere, to serve their ends.  Moi, je suis realiste.  And so, monsieur, I have invented an idea.  I am painting over his head while he sits there at the piano a picture hanging on the wall—­of one of these young town girls who have no mysteriousness at all, no youth; nothing but a cheap knowledge and defiance, and good humour.  He is looking up at it, but he does not see it.  I will make the face of that girl the face of modern life, and he shall sit staring at it, seeing nothing.  What do you think of my idea?”