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Updated: June 10, 2025
The place had both colour and quiet; I thought it a perfect room for work and went so far as to say to myself that, if it were mine to sit and scribble in, there was no knowing but I might learn to write as well as the author of "Beltraffio." This distinguished man still didn't reappear, and I rummaged freely among his treasures.
That place belongs, incontestably, to Beltraffio, in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor.
Ambient was a jolly, ruddy personage, dressed in velveteen and rather limp feathers, whom I guessed to be the vicar's wife, our hostess did not introduce me, and who immediately began to talk to Ambient about chrysanthemums. This was a safe subject, and yet there was a certain surprise for me in seeing the author of Beltraffio even in such superficial communion with the Church of England.
Quentin, in the embarrassment of surprising a secret that its possessor was doubtless unconscious of betraying, reverted hurriedly to the Beltraffio. "I came to see this," she said. "It's very beautiful." Miss Fenno's eye travelled incuriously over the mystic blue reaches of the landscape. "I suppose so," she assented; adding, after another tentative pause, "You come here often, don't you?"
She didn't succeed, and wouldn't even had she tried much harder, in making this seem to me anything less than monstrous. I stared at her and I think I blushed. "Don't you admire his genius? Don't you admire 'Beltraffio'?" She waited, and I wondered what she could possibly say. She didn't speak, I could see, the first words that rose to her lips; she repeated what she had said a few minutes before.
In another flash of lightning she slowly raised her head and looked at me long and earnestly. She was very beautiful, like the Virgin of Beltraffio in the National Gallery, more beautiful than I had supposed possible, her deep, passionate eyes very tender and pitiful in their pleading, beseeching glance.
My hostess so far as she could be called so delicate and quiet, in a white dress, with her beautiful child at her side, was worthy of the author of a work so distinguished as "Beltraffio." Round her neck she wore a black velvet ribbon, of which the long ends, tied behind, hung down her back, and to which, in front, was attached a miniature portrait of her little boy.
"Beatrice won't let you see him, dear" as to which our young lady looked at me, though addressing our companion. "Do you call that being perfect as a mother?" Ambient asked. "Yes, from her point of view." "Damn her point of view!" cried the author of "Beltraffio." And he left the room; after which we heard him ascend the stairs.
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