“Then passion is the highest plane to which the materialist can rise?” asked Evelyn, thinking of Owen.
“Yes; I don’t think I’m wrong in admitting that, in the main, that is Blake’s contention.”
But at this point he had broken off his discourse, and told an anecdote in his half-witty, half-wistful way about an article which he had written on Blake and which had somehow strayed into the hands of a man and his wife living in Normandy. This couple were at the time engaged in continuing the tradition of Bastien Lepage. They laboriously copied what they saw in the fields—grey days, hobnailed boots and the rest of it. His article had, however, awakened them to the vanity of realism; and they had taken their pictures to a neighbouring tower, and at the top of it made a h*******t of all their abo
