Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/228

 nor feeling in the pictures of Monet, Renoir, and Degas. They stop where the difficulty really begins. They cannot draw and so they pass off their inability as a novel method of painting. But the world will soon return to the true art.

Have you heard, she went on with some intensity, what a dreadful thing the French government has done? It has accepted the Caillebotte collection for the Luxembourg, a collection which contains that dreadful Olympia by Manet, a cold, ugly picture. Flesh was never that colour. Bouguereau was the last painter to understand the painting of flesh, and with him the secret will die. When you come to Paris I will show you my beautiful Bouguereau.

When I come to Paris!

O, you will come! She spoke with conviction.

Their walk led them over a brow of a hill into one of the older residence quarters of the town, where stately, old-fashioned houses raised themselves at the head of broad lawns, adorned with cast-iron effigies of dogs and deer or with fountains in which Cupids held duck spouting water from their beaks; other dwellings were set deep in rich, tangled gardens of flowers and spreading trees, enclosed behind white picket-fences.

Gareth pointed to one of these. That's the old Moore house, he said.

Mabel Moore! I remember her. What has become of her?