“Perhaps so,” the Semitic man agreed. “People still believe they have to work to live.”
“Sure you have to work to live,” Fairchild said quickly.
“You'd naturally say that. If a man has had to deny himself any pleasures during his pleasuring years, he always likes to believe it was necessary. That’s where you get your Puritans from. We don’t like to see any one violate laws we observed, and get away with it. God knows, heaven is a dry reward for abnegation.”
Fairchild rose and went to stand again before the fluid, passionate fixity of the marble. “The end of art,” he repeated. “I mean, to the consumer, not to us: we have to do it, they don’t. They can take it or leave it. Probably Gordon feels the same way about stories that I do about sculpture, but for me. . .” He mused upon the marble for a time. “When the statue is completely nude, it has only a coldly formal significance, you know. But when some foreign matter like a leaf or a fold of drapery (kept there in defiance of gravity by God only knows what) draws the imagination to where the organs of reproduction are concealed, it lends the statue a warmer, a—a—more—”’
“Speculative significance,” supplied the Semitic man.
“—speculative significance which I must admit I require in my sculpture.”
“Certainly the moralists agree with you.”
“Why shouldn’t they? The same food nourishes everybody’s convictions alike. And a man that earns his bread in a glue factory must get some sort of pleasure from smelling cattle hooves, or he’d change his job. There’s your perversion, I think.”
“And,” the Semitic man said, “if you spend your life worrying over sex, it’s an added satisfaction to get paid for your time.”
