"Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded quite clever and advanced in the early 'nineties. To-day they have a dreadfully warmed-up flavour. That is the great delusion of you would-be advanced satirists; you imagine you can sit down comfortably for a couple of decades saying daring and startling things about the age you live in, which, whatever other defects it may have, is certainly not standing still. The whole of the Sherard Blaw school of discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture in a travelling circus. However, you will always have relays of people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird of yesterday, and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of something new and revolutionising."
"WOULD you mind passing that plate of sandwiches," asked one of the trio of young ladies, emboldened by famine.
"With pleasure," said Lady Caroline, deftly passing her a nearly empty plate of bread-and-butter.
"I meant the place of caviare sandwiches. So sorry to trouble you," persisted the young lady Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her attention to a newcomer.
"A very interesting exhibition," Ada Spelvexit was saying;"faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of technique, and quite a master-touch in the way of poses. But have you noticed how very animal his art is? He seems to shut out the soul from his portraits. I nearly cried when I saw dear Winifred depicted simply as a good-looking healthy blonde."
"I wish you had," said Lady Caroline; "the spectacle of a strong, brave woman weeping at a private view in the Rutland Galleries would have been so sensational. It would certainly have been reproduced in the next Drury Lane drama. And I'm so unlucky; I never see these sensational events. I was ill with appendicitis, you know, when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband, after seventeen years of estrangement, during a State luncheon party at Windsor. The old queen was furious about it. She said it was so disrespectful to the cook to be thinking of such a thing at such a time."
Lady Caroline's recollections of things that hadn't happened at the Court of Queen Victoria were notoriously vivid; it was the very widespread fear that she might one day write a book of reminiscences that made her so universally respected.
"As for his full-length picture of Lady Brickfield," continued Ada, ignoring Lady Caroline's commentary as far as possible, "all the expression seems to have been deliberately concentrated in the feet; beautiful feet, no doubt, but still, hardly the most distinctive part of a human being."
"To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an eccentricity, but it is scarcely an indiscretion," pronounced Lady Caroline.
One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing flutter of attention was a costume study of Francesca Bassington. Francesca had secured some highly desirable patronage for the young artist, and in return he had enriched her pantheon of personal possessions with a clever piece of work into which he had thrown an unusual amount of imaginative detail. He had painted her in a costume of the great Louis's brightest period, seated in front of a tapestry that was so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely be said to form part of the background. Flowers and fruit, in exotic profusion, were its dominant note; quinces, pomegranates, passion- flowers, giant convolvulus, great mauve-pink roses, and grapes that were already being pressed by gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian vintage, stood out on its woven texture. The same note was struck in the beflowered satin of the lady's kirtle, and in the pomegranate pattern of the brocade that draped the couch on which she was seated. The artist had called his picture "Recolte." And after one had taken in all the details of fruit and flower and foliage that earned the composition its name, one noted the landscape that showed through a broad casement in the left-hand corner. It was a landscape clutched in the grip of winter, naked, bleak, black-frozen; a winter in which things died and knew no rewakening. If the picture typified harvest, it was a harvest of artificial growth.
"It leaves a great deal to the imagination, doesn't it?" said Ada Spelvexit, who had edged away from the range of Lady Caroline's tongue.
"At any rate one can tell who it's meant for," said Serena Golackly.
"Oh, yes, it's a good likeness of dear Francesca," admitted Ada;"of course, it flatters her."
"That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait painting," said Serena; "after all, if posterity is going to stare at one for centuries it's only kind and reasonable to be looking just a little better than one's best."
"What a curiously unequal style the artist has," continued Ada, almost as if she felt a personal grievance against him; "I was just noticing what a lack of soul there was in most of his portraits.
Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at my gatherings for old women, he's made her look just an ordinary dairy-maidish blonde; and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless woman I've ever met, well, he's given her quite - "
"Hush," said Serena, "the Bassington boy is just behind you."
