“Don’t look like that. I won’t hear what you have to say. You may be very wise, but I must be listened to sometimes. Now, I won’t let you speak unless you promise to leave off reading and sing to me.” George nodded a promise, unable to resist her, and there was an end to the higher education for that evening. The second string to the young husband’s educational bow was art, in whose refining and ennobling influence he believed dutifully, though without much practical sense of it. He took her to concerts in which she found no acute pleasure, declaring that sitting still so long in one narrow chair tired her, and that she would rather hear him play and sing to her at home. He took her to picture galleries, which would have been a rather penitential exercise for him by himself, but from which he thought her more delicately organized feminine temperament might derive some benefit, “taking it in through the pores” as it were, as boys absorb a love and longing for the hunting-field from the sight of their father’s scarlet coat and hunting crop. Now this experiment had more interesting results. The first place he took her to was the Royal Academy, where she examined the pictures in a dazed silence, which George hoped was reflective admiration; but when they returned home she confessed simply that she did not want to see any more pictures. In the National Gallery, on the other hand, where George took her rather apologetically, with a sort of feeling that this was too “advanced” for her present state of art knowledge, Nouna, at first sight of the frames inclined to be restive, began speedily to show an odd and unexpected pleasure, which deepened before certain Gainsboroughs into childish delight. “I should like the gentleman who painted that lady to paint me,” she said, when she had gazed long and lovingly at one graceful bygone beauty. George explained the difficulties in the way of her wish, but was highly pleased with the orthodoxy of her taste. Later experiences, however, gave a shock to this feeling. The National Gallery having effected her reconciliation with pictorial art, Nouna was praiseworthily anxious to learn more of it, and insisted on visiting every exhibition in London. It then gradually became manifest that she had a marked preference for the works of Continental painters, from the lively delineator of Parisian types of character to the works of the daring artist who presents the figures of sacred history with strong limelight effects. “They make me see things, and they make me feel things,” was all the explanation she could give of the instinctive preferences of her sensuous and poetical temperament.