Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/174

 the woman, bearing to her mother the vague, spiritualised resemblance that memory bears to presence—your dreams to your waking thoughts.

Cerise was altogether fairer in complexion and fainter in colouring, slenderer, and perhaps a little taller, with more of soul in her blue eyes but less of intellect, and a pure, serene face that a poet would have fallen down and worshipped, but from which a painter would have turned to study the richer tones of the Marquise.

Some women seem to me like statues, and some like pictures. The latter fascinate you at once, compelling your admiration even on the first glance, while you pass by the former with a mere cold and critical approval. But every man who cares for art must have experienced how the influence of the model or the marble grows on him day by day. How, time after time, fresh beauties seem to spring beneath his gaze as if his very worship called them into life, and how, when he has got the masterpiece by heart, and sees every curve of the outline, every turn of the chisel in his dreams, he no longer wonders that it was not a painter, but a sculptor, who languished to death in hopeless adoration of his handiwork. These statue-women move, in no majestic march, over the necks of captive thousands to the strains of all kinds of music, but stand in their leafy, shadowy nooks apart, teaching a man to love them by degrees, and he never forgets the lesson, nor would he if he could.

It is scarcely necessary to say that the Marquise loved her daughter very dearly. For years, the child had occupied the first place in her warm impassioned heart. To send Cerise away was the first lesson in self-sacrifice the proud and prosperous lady had ever been forced to learn, and many a tear it used to cost her, when her ball-dress had been folded up and Célandine dismissed for the night. Nor, indeed, was the Quadroon's pillow quite dry when first she lost her nursling; and long after Cerise slept calmly and peacefully between those quiet convent walls, far off in Normandy, the two women would lie broad awake, calling to remembrance the blue eyes and the brown curls and the pretty ways of their darling, till their very hearts ached with longing to look on her once more. Now, since