week's washing," said Miss Van Tuyn,
recovering herself. "But I would rather be on the clothes-line than on
the line at the Royal Academy. No, Dick, I shall wait."

"What for, my girl?"

"For you to get over your acute attack of Cafe Royal. You don't know how
they laugh at you in Paris for always painting morphinomanes and chloral
drinkers. That sort of thing was done to death in France in the youth of
Degas. It may be new over here. But England always lags behind in art,
always follows at the heels of the French. You are too big a man--"

"I've got it, Smith," said Garstin, interrupting in the quiet even voice
of one who had been indulging an undisturbed process of steady thought,
and who now announced the definite conclusion reached. "I have it. Frank
Dicksee is the man!"

At this moment Jennings, who for some time had been uneasily groping
through his beard, and turning the rings round and round on his thin
damp fingers, broke in with a flood of speech about modern French art,
in which names of all the latest painters of Paris spun by like twigs on
a spate of turbulent water. The Georgians were soon up and after him
in full cry. It was now nearly closing time, and several friends of
Garstin's, models and others, who had been scattered about in the cafe,
and who were on their way out, stopped to hear what was going on. Some
adherents of Jennings also came up. The discussion became animated.
Voices waxed roaringly loud or piercingly shrill. The little Bolshevik,
suddenly losing her round faced calm and the shepherdess look in
her eyes, burst forth in a voluble outcry in praise of the beauty of
anarchy, expressing herself in broken English, spoken with a cockney
accent, in broken French and liquid Russian. Enid Blunt, increasingly
guttural, and mingling German words with her Bedford Park English,
refuted, or strove to refute, Jennings's ecstatic praise of French
verse, citing rapidly poems composed by members of the Sitwell group,
songs of Siegfried Sassoon, and even lyrics by Lady Margaret Sackville
and Miss Victoria Sackville West. Jennings, who thought he was still
speaking about pictures and statues, though he had now abandoned the
painters and sculptors to their horrid fates in the hands of Garstin and
Smith, replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally,
emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into the
only tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemy