Before the American could answer someone else broke in vehemently.

“D’you mean to say you can look at the painting of that flesh and say it’s not good?”

“I don’t say that.  I think the right breast is very well painted.”

“The right breast be damned,” shouted Lawson.  “The whole thing’s a miracle of painting.”

He began to describe in detail the beauties of the picture, but at this table at Gravier’s they who spoke at length spoke for their own edification.  No one listened to him.  The American interrupted angrily.

“You don’t mean to say you think the head’s good?”

Lawson, white with passion now, began to defend the head; but Clutton, who had been sitting in silence with a look on his face of good-humoured scorn, broke in.

“Give him the head.  We don’t want the head.  It doesn’t affect the picture.”

“All right, I’ll give you the head,” cried Lawson.  “Take the head and be damned to you.”

“What about the black line?” cried the American, triumphantly pushing back a wisp of hair which nearly fell in his soup.  “You don’t see a black line round objects in nature.”

“Oh, God, send down fire from heaven to consume the blasphemer,” said Lawson.  “What has nature got to do with it?  No one knows what’s in nature and what isn’t!  The world sees nature through the eyes of the artist.  Why, for centuries it saw horses jumping a fence with all their legs extended, and by Heaven, sir, they were extended.  It saw shadows black until Monet discovered they were coloured, and by Heaven, sir, they were black.  If we choose to surround objects with a black line, the world will see the black line, and there will be a black line; and if we paint grass red and cows blue, it’ll see them red and blue, and, by Heaven, they will be red and blue.”

“To hell with art,” murmured Flanagan.  “I want to get ginny.”

Lawson took no notice of the interruption.

“Now look here, when Olympia was shown at the Salon, Zola—­amid the jeers of the Philistines and the hisses of the pompiers, the academicians, and the public, Zola said:  `I look forward to the day when Manet’s picture will hang in the Louvre opposite the Odalisque of Ingres, and it will not be the Odalisque which will gain by comparison.’  It’ll be there.  Every day I see the time grow nearer.  In ten years the Olympia will be in the Louvre.”

“Never,” shouted the American, using both hands now with a sudden desperate attempt to get his hair once for all out of the way.  “In ten years that picture will be dead.  It’s only a fashion of the moment.  No picture can live that hasn’t got something which that picture misses by a million miles.”

“And what is that?”

“Great art can’t exist without a moral element.”

“Oh God!” cried Lawson furiously.  “I knew it was that.  He wants morality.”  He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication.  “Oh, Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you discovered America?”