There was a silence; Mary felt a little uncomfortable. "May I have a
look at what you've been painting?" she had the courage to say at last.

Gombauld had only half smoked his cigarette; in any case he wouldn't
begin work again till he had finished. He would give her the five
minutes that separated him from the bitter end. "This is the best place
to see it from," he said.

Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything.
Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a
loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a
man and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but even aggressively
in drawing. Trompe-l'oeil--there was no other word to describe the
delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the
horse. What was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations
were gone. One could admire representationalism in the Old Masters.
Obviously. But in a modern...? At eighteen she might have done so.
But now, after five years of schooling among the best judges, her
instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation was
contempt--an outburst of laughing disparagement. What could Gombauld be
up to? She had felt so safe in admiring his work before. But now--she
didn't know what to think. It was very difficult, very difficult.

"There's rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn't there?" she ventured at
last, and inwardly congratulated herself on having found a critical
formula so gentle and at the same time so penetrating.

"There is," Gombauld agreed.

Mary was pleased; he accepted her criticism; it was a serious
discussion. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes.
"I think it's awfully fine," she said. "But of course it's a little
too...too...trompe-l'oeil for my taste." She looked at Gombauld, who
made no response, but continued to smoke, gazing meditatively all the
time at his picture. Mary went on gaspingly. "When I was in Paris this
spring I saw a lot of Tschuplitski. I admire his work so tremendously.
Of course, it's frightfully abstract now--frightfully abstract and
frightfully intellectual. He just throws a few oblongs on to his
canvas--quite flat, you know, and painted in pure primary colours. But
his design is wonderful. He's getting more and more abstract every day.
He'd given up the third dimension when I was there and was just thinking
of giving up the second. Soon, he says, there'll be just the blank