“It will be your own fault, now, if you don’t like what I say,” laughed the young girl, with ready tact, for a quick glance or two had already satisfied her that the picture was not to her taste.  “My only remark is this, Mr. Blauvelt,—­Nature does not make the same impression on me that it does on you.  There is the scene, as you say.  How can I make you understand what I feel?  Nature always looks so natural to me!  It awakens within me various emotions, but never surprise,—­I mean that kind of surprise one has when seeing a lady dressed in colors that do not harmonize.  To my eye, even in gaudy October, Nature appears to blend her effects so that there is nothing startling or incongruous.”

“Is there anything startling and incongruous in my picture?”

“I have not said that.  You see you have brought me into perplexity, you have taken me beyond my depth, by insisting on having my opinion.  I have read a good many art criticisms first and last.  Art is gabbled about a good deal in society, you know, and we have to keep a set of phrases on hand, whether we understand them or not.  But since you believe in impressions, and will have mine, it is this as nearly as I can express it.  You are under the influence of a school or a fashion in art, and perhaps unconsciously you are controlled by this when looking at the scene there.  It seems to me that if I were an artist I should try to get on my canvas the same effects that nature produces, and I would do it after my own fashion and not after some received method just then prevailing.  Let me illustrate what I mean by a phase of life that I know more about.  There are some girls in society whose ambition it is to dress in the latest style.  They are so devoted to fashion that they appear to forget themselves, and are happy if their costume reflects the mode of the hour, even though it makes them look hideous.  My aim would be to suggest the style rather unobtrusively, and clothe myself becomingly.  I’m too egotistical to be ultra-fashionable.  Since I, who am in love chiefly with myself, can so modify style, much more should you, who are devoted to nature, make fashion in art subservient to nature.”

“You are right.  I have worked too much in studios and not enough out of doors.  Ever since I have been sketching this summer, I have had a growing dissatisfaction, and a sense of being trammelled.  I do believe, as you say, that a certain received method or fashion of treatment has been uppermost in my mind, and I have been trying to torture—­nature into conformity.  I’ll paint this thing all out and begin again.”

“No, don’t do that.  Are not pictures like people a little?  If I wanted to improve in some things, it wouldn’t do for me to be painted all out.  Cannot changes for the better come by softening features here and bringing out others there, by colorings a little more like those before us, and—­pardon me—­by not leaving so much to the imagination?  You artists can see more between the lines than we people can.”