An Art-Show

A handful of onlookers were engaged in studying Helen's newest painting displayed -- a dark image of the dim red sun, covered by cloud-wrack, staring down upon an ice-locked landscape of the entrance to a city flanked by a scattering of ruined and rather leprous-looking buildings, clearly damaged by violence as well as neglect and the elements, and surrounded by gibbets upholding twisted skeletons -- while she sat by, attempting to restrain a cough. One man, young and with a drawn yet overeager expression, began to compliment Helen lavishly on how her work "showed the dark face of true reality" and served as "an authentic artistic interpretation of Lord Kelvin's just-proposed principle of the universal exhaustion of energy". When she vainly attempted to explain that it was hardly her image -- was derived from an inspiration, in the most literal sense of an idea introduced from outside -- her interlocutor simply became effusive in his accolades for her obvious humility.