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For the Strehla children, born to nothing else, were all born with beauty; white or brown, they were equally lovely to look upon, and when they went into the church to Mass, with their curling locks and their clasped hands, they stood under the grim statues like cherubs flown down off some fresco.
Small, chubby cherubs, or cupids doing the work of men, weaving draperies, preparing food, chopping meat, plucking grapes and carrying them away in miniature wheelbarrows, were faithfully portrayed in rich colors.
"It makes no difference; finish it as best you can; I am sick of it; you will do it well enough. If it is bad, I will take the responsibility." "Do you mean me really to finish it altogether?" "Yes; I tell you I have a great work on hand. I cannot waste my time over such toys as acanthus leaves and cherubs' eyes!" He bent down and examined the thing carefully.
Forces above her own swayed and hurried her like a lifeless body dragged by flying wheels: they could not unnerve her will, or rather, what it really was, her sense of submission to a destiny. Looked at from the height of the palm-waving cherubs over the fallen martyr in the picture, she seemed as nerveless as a dreamy girl. The raised arms and bent elbows were an illusion of indifference.
Often, while looking at the arched portal, I have been gladdened by the sight of a score of these little girls and boys in pink, blue, yellow and crimson frocks bursting suddenly forth into the sunshine like a swarm of gay butterflies that had been shut up in the solemn gloom. Or I might compare them to cherubs haunting that holy place.
The auditorium was a large one, semicircular in shape, with tiers of seats rising circus-fashion to a ceiling decorated with silver stars and pink naked cherubs. The stage had upon it a table, some chairs, and a reading-desk draped in crimson cloth. Below the stage was a small orchestra, consisting of two fiddles, a cornet, drum, and a piano.
In the centre is the Baptism of Christ, with a landscape background; on the right are SS. Augustine and Stephen; on the left, SS. Nicholas and Michael. Above are half-lengths of the Madonna and Child in a vesica starred with cherubs; on the right, SS. Peter Martyr and Francis; on the left, SS. Peter and Dominic. Another has the Madonna, SS. Julian, James, Dominic, and Matthew on a gold ground.
When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.
In the centre panel she sits enthroned, with the Child on her knee, clad in an embroidered robe, on the breast of which are two naked cherubs. On the left stand S. Medardo and S. Sebastian, on the right S. Andrew and S. Rock, each figure separated, as in the old polyptychs, by the pilasters of the frame.
It was a lovely day, and looking up at the sky over what used to be a school dedicated to the gentle Jesus, which is just by the place where one of the seventeen-inchers has blown a forty-foot hole, I saw a little round cloud shape in the blue, and then another, and then a cluster of them; the kind of soft little cloudlets on which Renaissance cherubs rest their chubby elbows and with fat faces inclined on their hands consider mortals from cemetery monuments.
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