Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/345

 narcissi, and painted a St. Ursula on wood for her chapel in Paris.

She painted well, but the St. Ursula progressed but slowly.

When she was alone she would let her palette fall to her side and sit thinking; and the bells would ring across the waters till she hated them.

What was the use of painting a St. Ursula? St. Ursula did not want to be painted; and all art was nothing but repetition: nobody had found out anything in colour really, since Giotto, though to be sure he could not paint transparencies or reflections. And she would leave her St. Ursula impatiently, and read Cavalcaselle and Zugler and Winckelmann and Rumohr and Passavant, and when she did go out would go to some little remote, unvisited chapel and sit for hours before some dim disputed fresco.

She would be in London next week, in its blaze of gas, jewels, luxury, and political discussion; she said that she liked these calm, dusky, silent places, alone with S. Louis and S. Giles and S. Jerome.