I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies,
principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth.
Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb drawing of
an arm! I don’t remember it among the figures from Michel Angelo, which
seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I think, or after a
cast from Nature.——Oh!——
——Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,——I said, taking up the
drawing-book with a lock on it.——Yes,——she said.——I should like to
see her style of working on a small scale.——There was nothing in it
worth showing,——she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which
proved to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven’t the least
doubt. I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what
her fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they were
bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her thoughts
seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else. The young
fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I think he
has once or twice sent her what the landlady’s daughter calls bó-kays
of flowers,——somebody has, at any rate.——I saw a book she had, which
must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary title-page,
which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,——a face
from memory, apparently,——one of those faces that small children loathe
without knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven
so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
“good men,” and that heaven is full of such.——The gentleman with the
_diamond_——the Koh-i-noor, so called by us——was not encouraged, I think,
by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He pulls his purple
mustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never sees him as it
should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would have been in love
with her before this time, sometimes looks from his corner across the
long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I wish you were up here by
me, or I were down there by you,——which would, perhaps, be a more natural
arrangement than the present one. But nothing comes of all this,——and
nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding out the girl’s fancies
by looking into her locked drawing-book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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