“As far as I can make out,” I replied, “you are really only made up of large lumps of space, loosely tied together with electricity. It doesn’t sound flattering, but there it is.”
She frowned attractively.
“But I can’t believe that.”
“Why do you want to believe it?” said Harrison. “It’s all words. When it comes to doing anything practical you have to come back to common sense. My friend Professor Alcock—”
“Yes, yes, I know.” She waved the interruption aside impatiently. “But the idea is the real thing, isn’t it? Haven’t they come round to thinking that poetry and imagination and the beautiful things of the mind are the only true realities after all?”
“Of course beauty is the only true reality,” said Lathom eagerly. “But it isn’t always what ordinary people think of as beauty. I mean, it’s not pretty-pretty. When you think a thing, then you create it and it exists. What’s the use of arguing what you make it of ? That doesn’t matter to the thing itself, any more than the stuff paints are made of matter to the picture.”
“It matters a good deal in practice,” said Harrison. “Now the Pre-Raphaelites understood that—though, mind you, I don’t think much of the Pre-Raphaelite school myself. Some of their pictures are so remarkably ugly, and so exaggerated in colour. Take that thing of Holman Hunt’s, now—”
“Darling,” said Mrs. Harrison, with emphasis, “you’re sidetracking.”
“No, I’m not. I’m coming back to that. What I mean is that the Pre-Raphaelites, especially William Morris, knew a great deal about the material of their paints. They used to get the right stuff and grind it