“There she is,” he cried.
“I must stop and have a good look at that.
I make a point of it when I come to the Louvre.”
“Why?”
“Hang it all, it’s Leonardo’s most celebrated picture.
It’s one of the most important pictures in the world.”
“Important to you?”
Charley was beginning to find her a trifle irritating; he couldn’t make out what she was getting at; but he was a good-humoured youth, and he wasn’t going to lose his temper.
“A picture may be important even if it isn’t very important to me.”
“But it’s only you who count.
So far as you’re concerned the only meaning a picture has is the meaning it has for you.”
“That seems an awfully conceited way of looking at it.”
“Does that picture say anything to you really?”
“Of course it does.
It says all sorts of things, but I don’t suppose I could put them any better than Pater did.
He wrote a piece about it that’s in all the anthologies.”
But even as he spoke he recognized that his answer was lame.
He was beginning to have a vague inkling of what Lydia meant, and then the uneasy feeling came to him that there was something in art that he’d never been told about.
But he fortunately remembered what his mother had said about Manet’s Olympia.
“In point of fact I don’t know why you should say anything about a picture at all.
You either like it or you don’t.”
“And you really like that one?” she asked in a tone of mild interrogation.
“Very much.”
“Why?”
He thought for a moment.
“Well, you see, I’ve known it practically all my life.”
“That’s why you like your friend Simon, isn’t it?” she smiled.
He felt it was an unfair retort.
“All right.
You take me and show me the pictures you like.”
The position was reversed.
It was not he, as he had expected, who was leading the way and with such information as would add interest to the respective canvases, sympathetically drawing her attention to the great masterpieces he had always cared for; but it was she who was conducting him.
Very well.
He was quite ready to put himself in her hands and see what it was all about.
“Of course,” he said to himself, “she’s Russian.
One has to make allowances for that.”
They trudged past acres of canvas, through one room after another, for Lydia had some difficulty in finding her way; but finally she stopped him in front of a small picture that you might easily have missed if you had not been looking for it.
“Chardin,” he said.
“Yes, I’ve seen that before.”
“But have you ever looked at it?”
“Oh, yes.
Chardin wasn’t half a bad painter in his way.
My mother thinks a lot of him.
I’ve always rather liked his still lifes myself.”
“Is that all it means to you?
It breaks my heart.”
“That?” cried Charley with astonishment.
“A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine?
Of course it’s very well painted.”
“Yes, you’re right; it’s very well painted; it’s painted with pity and love.