"You know, I should think people would be crazy to paint you. How do you
like your tea? Sugar? Cream? One lump? Two lumps?" Having flung out
answers at random, Jennie leaned forward to take her cup, while the
kindly voice ran on: "Just as you sit there you’re a picture. Funny I
should have given you a tan-colored cushion, because it tones in
exactly."
Jennie explained that the various shades of brown and some of the deeper
ones of red were among her favorites.
"Because they go so well with your hair," her hostess said,
comprehendingly, and studying her now more frankly. "My dear, you’ve got
the most lovely hair! It isn’t auburn; it isn’t coppery; it isn’t red.
It’s—what is it? Oh, I see! It’s amber—it’s the extraordinary shade
Romney gets into some of his portraits of Lady Hamilton. You see it in
the one in the Frick gallery, if I remember rightly. You must look the
next time you’re there."
Jennie tried to stammer that she would, only that her syllables ran into
one another and became incoherent.
"But Romney couldn’t paint _you_," Mrs. Collingham declared,
enthusiastically, putting her cup to her lips. "He’s too Georgian.
You’re the twentieth century. You’re the perfect spirit of the
age—restless, rebellious, wistful, and delicate all at once. Girls
nowadays remind me of exquisite fragile things like the spire of the
Sainte Chapelle, only built of steel. You’ve got the steel look—all
slender and unbendable. It’s curious that—the way women look like the
ages in which they’re born. You’ve only to go through a portrait
collection to see that it’s so. Take the Stuart women, for instance—the
Vandyke and Lely women—great saucer-eyed things, with sensual lips and
breasts. And then the Holbein women, so terribly got up in their stiff
Sunday clothes, which they must have hurried to put into their cedar
chests the minute they got home from mass. But they belong to their
time, don’t you think?"
Jennie could only say she did think, vowing in her heart that the next
day would see her going round the Metropolitan Museum with a catalogue.
"But you! Hubert Wray says he’s done a wonderful study of you, and I’m
crazy to see it. The only thing I don’t like from his description is
that he’s got you in a Greek dress and attitude, and _I_ think, now that
I’ve seen you, that the day after to-morrow is your style. What do you
say yourself?"
"I don’t know about the day after to-morrow; I’m so busy with to-day."
Mrs. Collingham took this with a pleasant little laugh.
"You clever thing! You won’t give yourself away." She mused a few
seconds, a smile on her lips, and then said, with a sudden lifting of
the eyes, "What do you think of Bob?"
The girl could only stammer:
"Think of him—in what way?"
"Do you think he looks like me?"
In this rapid, unexpected shifting of the ground, Jennie was like a
giddy person trying to keep her head.
"Well, yes—in a way; only—"
Mrs. Collingham laughed again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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