"Why didn't you say you knew him before?" she demanded.
"The question always arises if Alec's anywhere about. You know he's like a bear with a sore head about young men."
"It's the duty of a father's head to be sore. I quite agree with Alec."
"But if you'd only said 'He's quite all right, he stays with me in Haslemere----'"
"Quite a number of people stay with me in Haslemere, if that's a social guarantee----"
"You know what I mean. Alec's simply a troglodyte. He doesn't belong to to-day. It's all very flattering, of course, but he simply can't forget what things were like when I was a girl. They never dreamed of letting us travel without a maid; why, we actually had to sit still in the carriage till the footman had opened our own front door. Alec doesn't realise that the world's moved on since then. And you could have put it all on a proper footing with three words!"
"Yes, his coming here. All that fuss! I think he's perfectly delightful. And I know those Somerset Trehernes if they're the Edward Trehernes of Witton Regis. And I expect his painting's clever too. He looks as if he had all the gifts.... Now I make you answerable for Alec, George. That he's not simply stupid and unreasonable, I mean. I don't mean that he's not perfectly right to ask the usual questions, but Jennie's got to be considered too. She's quite old enough to know her own mind. Now I'm going to them. Are you coming?"
"I'll come along in a few minutes," I replied.
My intelligence with regard to painting is simply that of the ordinary man. I seldom speculate on the relation between one art and another. True, I have read my Browning, and have wondered whether he really knew what he was talking about when he spoke of a man "finding himself" in one medium, and starting again all unprejudiced and anew in another. It sounds rather of a piece with much more art talk we heard when we were young.
But Derwent Rose was only fallaciously young. He had time at his disposal in a sense that neither Browning nor you nor I ever had. And it seemed to me significant of the state of his memory that he should have turned his back on words and taken up paint instead. For the burden of his age was lifted from him, and he was advancing on his youth with a high and exhilarating sense of adventure. Now words had been the greatest concern of his "A," or Age Memory, and words, it must be admitted, have arrogated to themselves the lion's share of this strange faculty that we call remembering. Had he now found a means of expression more closely in correspondence with the untrodden ground ahead? In other words, was he a kind of alembical meeting-ground where the arts interpenetrated and became transmuted?... I hazard it merely as a conjecture in passing, and leave you to judge. Let us pass to that visit we paid to St Briac to see his sketches.