‘Very odd,’ Gumbril Junior echoed.
‘The fact is, I suppose,’ Gumbril Senior went on, smiling with a certain air of personal triumph, ‘the fact is that architecture is a more difficult and intellectual art than music. Music—that’s just a faculty you’re born with, as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense of plastic beauty—though that’s, of course, also an inborn faculty—is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It’s an affair of the mind; experience and thought have to draw it out. There are infant prodigies in music; but there are no infant prodigies in architecture.’ Gumbril Senior chuckled with a real satisfaction. ‘A man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think
