Reginald | Page 6

in the country."
"There are two subjects of conversation in the country: Servants, and
Can fowls be made to pay? The first, I believe, is compulsory, the
second optional."
"As a function," resumed Reginald, "the Academy is a failure."
"You think it would be tolerable without the pictures?"
"The pictures are all right, in their way; after all, one can always LOOK
at them if one is bored with one's surroundings, or wants to avoid an
imminent acquaintance."
"Even that doesn't always save one. There is the inevitable female
whom you met once in Devonshire, or the Matoppo Hills, or
somewhere, who charges up to you with the remark that it's funny how
one always meets people one knows at the Academy. Personally, I
DON'T think it funny."
"I suffered in that way just now," said Reginald plaintively, "from a
woman whose word I had to take that she had met me last summer in
Brittany."
"I hope you were not too brutal?"
"I merely told her with engaging simplicity that the art of life was the
avoidance of the unattainable."
"Did she try and work it out on the back of her catalogue?"
"Not there and then. She murmured something about being 'so clever.'
Fancy coming to the Academy to be clever!"
"To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the
evening."

"Which reminds me that I can't remember whether I accepted an
invitation from you to dine at Kettner's to-night."
"On the other hand, I can remember with startling distinctness not
having asked you to."
"So much certainty is unbecoming in the young; so we'll consider that
settled. What were you talking about? Oh, pictures. Personally, I rather
like them; they are so refreshingly real and probable, they take one
away from the unrealities of life."
"One likes to escape from oneself occasionally."
"That is the disadvantage of a portrait; as a rule, one's bitterest friends
can find nothing more to ask than the faithful unlikeness that goes
down to posterity as oneself. I hate posterity--it's so fond of having the
last word. Of course, as regards portraits, there are exceptions."
"For instance?"
"To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to heaven
prematurely."
"With the necessary care and impatience, you may avoid that
catastrophe."
"If you're going to be rude," said Reginald, "I shall dine with you
to-morrow night as well. The chief vice of the Academy," he continued,
"is its nomenclature. Why, for instance, should an obvious trout-stream
with a palpable rabbit sitting in the foreground be called 'an evening
dream of unbeclouded peace,' or something of that sort?"
"You think," said the Other, "that a name should economise description
rather than stimulate imagination?"
"Properly chosen, it should do both. There is my lady kitten at home,
for instance; I've called it Derry."
"Suggests nothing to my imagination but protracted sieges and

religious animosities. Of course, I don't know your kitten" -
"Oh, you're silly. It's a sweet name, and it answers to it-- when it wants
to. Then, if there are any unseemly noises in the night, they can be
explained succinctly: Derry and Toms."
"You might almost charge for the advertisement. But as applied to
pictures, don't you think your system would be too subtle, say, for the
Country Cousins?"
"Every reformation must have its victims. You can't expect the fatted
calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return.
Another darling weakness of the Academy is that none of its luminaries
must 'arrive' in a hurry. You can see them coming for years, like a
Balkan trouble or a street improvement, and by the time they have
painted a thousand or so square yards of canvas, their work begins to be
recognised."
"Someone who Must Not be Contradicted said that a man must be a
success by the time he's thirty, or never."
"To have reached thirty," said Reginald, "is to have failed in life."

REGINALD AT THE THEATRE

"After all," said the Duchess vaguely, "there are certain things you can't
get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude,
have certain well-defined limits."
"So, for the matter of that," replied Reginald, "has the Russian Empire.
The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place."
Reginald and the Duchess regarded each other with mutual distrust,
tempered by a scientific interest. Reginald considered that the Duchess
had much to learn; in particular, not to hurry out of the Carlton as

though afraid of losing one's last 'bus. A woman, he said, who is
careless of disappearances is capable of leaving town before
Good-wood, and dying at the wrong moment of an unfashionable
disease.
The Duchess thought that Reginald did not exceed the ethical standard
which circumstances demanded.
"Of course,"