t, waiting for her cue, and trying to collect her thoughts,
which were fluttering all abroad in generalities.

He went on with a touch of bitterness in his voice--

"I thought so. It's the old stumbling-block--my morality. If it hadn't
been for that, you would have told me, wouldn't you? that my figures
breathe and move, that every touch is true to life. But you daren't. You
are afraid of reality; facts are so immoral."

It would be impossible to describe the accent of scorn which Wyndham
threw into this last word.

"I thought your book very clever--in spite of the facts."

"Facts or no facts, you'd rather have your beliefs, wouldn't you?"

"No, no; I lost them all long ago!" cried Audrey, indignantly.

"I don't mean the old vulgar dogmas, of course, but the dear little
ideals that shed such a rosy light on things in general, you know. Ah!
that's what you want; and when an artist paints the real thing for you,
you say, 'Thank you; yes, it's very clever, I see; but I prefer the
pretty magic-lantern views, and the limelight of life.'"

"Not at all. I've much too great a regard for truth."

"I know. You're always looking for Truth, with a capital T; but, when it
comes to the point, you'd rather have two miserable little half-truths
than one honest whole truth about anything. That's why you disliked my
book."

"I didn't."

"Oh, yes, you did. What you disliked about it was this. It made you see
men and women, not as you imagined them, but as God made them. You saw,
that is, the naked human soul, stripped of the clumsy draperies that
Puritanism wraps round it. You saw below the surface--below the
top-dressing of education, below the solid layer of traditional
morality--deep down to the primitive passions, the fire of the clay
we're all made of. You saw love and hate, forces which are older than
all religions and all laws, older than man and woman, and which make
men and women what they are. And they seemed to you not commonplaces,
which they are--but something worse. You don't know that these _facts_
are the stuff of art, because they are the stuff of nature; that it
takes multitudes of such facts, not just one or two picked out because
of their 'moral beauty'--for you purists believe in the beauty of
morality as well as in the immorality of beauty--to make up a faithful
picture of life. And you shuddered, didn't you? as you laid down the
book you sat up half the night to read, and you said it was ugly,
revolting