Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/149

Rh Peter looked a little shily at his wine. 'Well—I don't care what you may call it when a fellow doesn't—but Lance must learn to sell, you know. I drink to his acquisition of the secret of a base popularity!'

'Oh yes, he must sell,' the boy's mother, who was still more, however, this seemed to give out, the Master's wife, rather artlessly conceded.

'Oh,' the sculptor, after a moment, confidently pronounced, 'Lance will. Don't be afraid. He will have learnt.'

'Which is exactly what Peter,' Mrs. Mallow gaily returned—'why in the world were you so perverse, Peter?—wouldn't, when he told him, hear of.'

Peter, when this lady looked at him with accusatory affection—a grace, on her part, not infrequent—could never find a word; but the Master, who was always all amenity and tact, helped him out now as he had often helped him before. 'That's his old idea, you know—on which we've so often differed: his theory that the artist should be all impulse and instinct. I go in, of course, for a certain amount of school. Not too much—but a due proportion. There's where his protest came in,' he continued to explain to his wife, 'as against what might, don't you see? be in question for Lance.'

'Ah, well,'—and Mrs. Mallow turned the violet eyes across the table at the subject of this discourse,—'he's sure to have meant, of course, nothing but good; but that wouldn't have prevented him, if Lance had taken his advice, from being, in effect, horribly cruel.'

They had a sociable way of talking of him to his face as if he had been in the clay or—at most—in the plaster, and the Master was unfailingly generous. He might have been waving Egidio to make him revolve. 'Ah, but poor Peter was not so wrong as to what it may, after all, come to that he will learn.'

'Oh, but nothing artistically bad,' she urged—still, for poor Peter, arch and dewy.