Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/147



RS. SPRATT had not only learnt how to dress fashionably, and to laugh at the peculiarities of old and trusty friends, and to use vulgar, modern, slang expressions that would have made the fastidious Chaucer turn in his grave; but she had also learnt how to get rid of that unconsciousness which had once been as a sweet frame to her beauty, and which had so nobly stood the test of those little round mirrors in her husband's studio.

(Have our Lady readers ever contemplated themselves in one of these?)

During the early days of her married life she had often sat by her husband in the National Gallery, reading aloud to him, as he copied those singularly seductive types of female loveliness which the early Italian Masters have made so especially their own; and she had shared in his enthusiasm for them, and had often blamed herself for being so utterly unlike.

There had been one picture in particular, the Martyrdom of Cupid, by Luca Signorelli, in which Cupid himself, and the nymphs who persecute him, are of a beauty so overpowering that J. Spratt and the trusty friends would always feel faint, and weak in their backs and legs, through sheer excess of sensuous pleasure when they gazed at it; and varied as those nymphs were in form, hue, and feature, she could not claim the remotest resemblance to any single nymph amongst them, not even when she tried in a little round mirror.

Jack Spratt himself, who had fallen in love, courted and married before he had ever seen an old picture, could not but also feel at

times that his wife was not quite such as the early Italian Masters would have chosen for a model; and he had been confirmed in this 67