“He has such an eye,” said Alicia, “for the possibilities of character.”

“Such an eye that he develops them.  I know one man he painted.  I suppose when the man was born he had an embryo soul, but in the meantime he and everybody else had forgotten about it.  All but Salter.  Salter re-created it on the original lines, and brought it up, and gave it a lodging behind the man’s, wrinkles.  I saw the picture.  It was fantastic—­psychologically.”

“Pyschology has a lot to say to portrait-painting, I know,” Alicia said.  “Do let him give you a little more.  It’s only Moselle.”  She felt quite direct and simple too in uttering her postulate.  Her eyes had a friendly, unembarrassed look, there was nothing behind them but the joy of talking intelligently about Salter.

Hilda did not even glance away.  She looked at her hostess instead, with an expression of candour so admirable that one might easily have mistaken it to be insincere.  It was part of her that she could swim in any current, and it was pleasant enough, for the moment, to swim in Alicia’s.  Both the Moselle and the cutlets, moreover, were of excellent quality.

“It’s everything to everything, don’t you think?  And especially, thank Heaven, to my trade.”  Her voice softened the brusqueness of this; the way she said it gave it a right to be said in any terms.  That was the case with flagrancies of hers sometimes.

“To discover motives and morals and passions and ambitions and to make a picture of them with your own body—­your face and hands and voice—­compare our plastic opportunity with the handling of a brush to do it, or a pen or a chisel!”

“I know what you mean,” said Alicia.  She had a little flush, and an excited hand among the wineglasses.  “No, I don’t want any; please don’t bother me!” to the man at her elbow with something in aspic.  “It’s much more direct—­your way.”

“And, I think, so much more primitive, so much earlier sanctioned, abiding so originally among the instincts!  Oh yes! if we are lightly esteemed it is because we are bad exponents.  The ideal has dignity enough.  They charge us, in their unimaginable stupidity, with failing to appreciate our lines, especially when they are Shakespeare’s—­with being unliterary.  You might—­good Heavens!—­as well accuse a painter of not being a musician!  Our business lies behind the words—­they are our mere medium!  Rosalind wasn’t literary—­why should I be?  But don’t indulge me in my shop, if it bores you,” Hilda added lightly, aware as she was that Miss Livingstone was never further from being bored.

“Oh, please go on!  If you only knew,” her lifted eyebrows confessed the tedium of Calcutta small talk.  “But why do you say you are lightly esteemed?  Surely the public is a touchstone—­and you hold the public in the hollow of your hand!”