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 me to learn that art also depends on population, on the herd instinct just as much as manufacturing automobiles or stockings does—”

“Only they can’t advertise art by means of women’s legs yet,” Mark Frost interrupted.

“Don’t be silly, Mark,” Mrs. Wiseman said sharply. “That’s exactly how art came to the attention of the ninety-nine who don’t produce it and so have any possible reason for buying it—postcards and lithographs barely esoteric enough to escape police persecution. Ask any man on the street what he understands by the word art: he'll tell you it means a picture. Won’t he?” she appealed to Fairchild.

“That’s so,” he agreed. “And it’s a wrong impression. Art means anything consciously done well, to my notion. Living, or building a good lawn mower, or playing poker. I don’t like this modern idea of restricting the word to painting, at all.”

“The art of Life, of a beautiful and complete existence of the Soul,” Mrs. Maurier put in. “Don’t you think that is Art’s greatest function, Mr. Gordon?”

“Of course you don’t, child,” Mrs. Wiseman told Fairchild, ignoring Mrs. Maurier. “As rabidly American as you are, you can’t stand that, can you? And there’s the seat of your bewilderment, Dawson—your belief that the function of creating art depends on geography.”

“It does. You can’t grow corn without something to plant it in.”

“But you don’t plant corn in geography: you plant it in soil. It not only does not matter where that soil is, you can even move the soil from one place to another—around the world, if you like—and it will still grow corn.”

“You’d have a different kind of corn, though—Russian corn, or Latin or Anglo-Saxon corn.”

“All corn is the same to the belly,” the Semitic man said.