We drove out through the Bois and by Suresnes, striking into a roundabout road to Versailles beyond St. Cloud.  It was June, a dustless and balmy noon, the air thinly gilded by a faint haze, and I know few things pleasanter than that road on a fair day of the early summer and no sweeter way to course it than in an open car; though I must not be giving myself out for a “motorist”—­I have not even the right cap.  I am usually nervous in big machines, too; but Ward has never caught the speed mania and holds a strange power over his chauffeur; so we rolled along peacefully, not madly, and smoked (like the car) in hasteless content.

“After all,” said George, with a placid wave of the hand, “I sometimes wish that the landscape had called me.  You outdoor men have all the health and pleasure of living in the open, and as for the work—­oh! you fellows think you work, but you don’t know what it means.”

“No?” I said, and smiled as I always meanly do when George “talks art.”  He was silent for a few moments and then said irritably,

“Well, at least you can’t deny that the academic crowd can draw!”

Never having denied it, though he had challenged me in the same way perhaps a thousand times, I refused to deny it now; whereupon he returned to his theme:  “Landscape is about as simple as a stage fight; two up, two down, cross and repeat.  Take that ahead of us.  Could anything be simpler to paint?”

He indicated the white road running before us between open fields to a curve, where it descended to pass beneath an old stone culvert.  Beyond, stood a thick grove with a clear sky flickering among the branches.  An old peasant woman was pushing a heavy cart round the curve, a scarlet handkerchief knotted about her head.

“You think it’s easy?” I asked.

“Easy!  Two hours ought to do it as well as it could be done—­at least, the way you fellows do it!” He clenched his fingers as if upon the handle of a house-painter’s brush.  “Slap, dash—­there’s your road.”  He paddled the air with the imaginary brush as though painting the side of a barn.  “Swish, swash—­there go your fields and your stone bridge.  Fit!  Speck!  And there’s your old woman, her red handkerchief, and what your dealer will probably call ‘the human interest,’ all complete.  Squirt the edges of your foliage in with a blow-pipe.  Throw a cup of tea over the whole, and there’s your haze.  Call it ‘The Golden Road,’ or ’The Bath of Sunlight,’ or ‘Quiet Noon.’  Then you’ll probably get a criticism beginning, ’Few indeed have more intangibly detained upon canvas so poetic a quality of sentiment as this sterling landscapist, who in Number 136 has most ethereally expressed the profound silence of evening on an English moor.  The solemn hush, the brooding quiet, the homeward ploughman—­’”

He was interrupted by an outrageous uproar, the grisly scream of a siren and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust, as a great white touring-car swung round us from behind at a speed that sickened me to see, and, snorting thunder, passed us “as if we had been standing still.”