It is not that Mr. James has laboured less but ten times
more than the Kensington student. But all the preliminary labour
having been discarded, it seems as simple and as slight a thing as may
be--a flower in a glass, the flower drawn only in its essentials, the
glass faintly indicated, a flowing tint of mauve dissolving to grey,
the red heart of the flower for the centre of interest. A decoration
for where? I imagine it in a boudoir whose walls are stretched and
whose windows are curtained with grey silk. From the ceiling hangs a
chandelier, cut glass--pure Louis XV. The furniture that I see is
modern; but here and there a _tabouret_, a _gueridon_, or a delicate
_etagere_, filled with tiny volumes of Musset and two or three rare
modern writers, recall the eighteenth century. And who sits in this
delicate boudoir perfumed with a faint scent, a sachet-scented
pocket-handkerchief? Surely one of Sargent's ladies. Perhaps the lady
in the shot-silk dress who sat on an eighteenth-century French sofa
two years ago in the Academy, her tiny, plump, curved white hand,
drawn as well in its interior as in exterior limits, hanging over the
gilt arm of the sofa. But she sits now, in the boudoir I have
imagined, in a low arm-chair covered with grey silk; her feet lie one
over the other on the long-haired rug; the fire burns low in the
grate, and the soft spring sunlight laps through the lace curtains,
filling the room with a bland, moody, retrospective atmosphere.
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