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The drawing-room was a big white square apartment with several big pictures and a pane of plate glass above the fireplace in the position in which one usually finds a mirror; this showed another room beyond, containing an exceptionally large, gloriously colored portrait in pastel larger than I had ever thought pastels could be. Except for the pictures both rooms were almost colorless.
For several days she cherished in secret a project to work and earn money, a great deal of money, with her pastels. People had so often praised her extraordinary and original talent that, taking Martine into her confidence, she sent her one fine morning to offer some of her fantastic bouquets to the color dealer of the Cours Sauvaire, who was a relation, it was said, of a Parisian artist.
She early developed a taste for art and a desire to study it. J. E. Vincent was her master in miniature painting, while Latour instructed her in the use of pastels. She was successful as a portrait painter and as a teacher, having some members of the royal family as pupils, who so esteemed her that they became her friends.
When, seized with remorse, he would talk about working, she would link her supple arms through his and laughingly hold him prisoner, so that he should not make himself ill again with overwork. And downstairs, they loved, too, the dining-room, so gay with its light panels relieved by blue bands, its antique mahogany furniture, its large flower pastels, its brass hanging lamp, always shining.
On wet days, when they had to be indoors, Aunt Grace Mary waylaid Beth continually, and trotted her off somewhere out of Uncle James's way. She would take her to her own room sometimes, a large, bright apartment, spick-and-span like the rest of the house; and show her the pictures pastels and water-colours chiefly with which it was stiffly decorated.
And moreover Redwood gave orders, so far ahead did his imagination go, for specially large tubes of liquid paint and boxes of pastels against the time when they should be needed. He laid in a cask or so of plasticine and modelling clay. "At first he and his tutor shall model together," he said, "and when he is more skilful he shall copy casts and perhaps animals.
"Oh, he doesn't have to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself," she said quite simply. I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its famille-verte vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames. "Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the house."
There were exactly forty drawings and paintings to be seen upon the sparsely-covered walls, which had been draped for the occasion with coarsely-woven linen of a dull olive-green, and about half of these were drawings and studies, small in point of size, executed in chalk and pastels.
On Chalmers's writing-table lay the photograph that he had received that day in the foreign mail. Ten minutes later he had Plumer at work making a sketch from it in pastels. At the end of an hour the artist rose and stretched wearily. "It's done," he yawned. "You'll excuse me for being so long. I got interested in the job. Lordy! but I'm tired. No bed last night, you know.
One of the young ladies, at length, shakes herself free from the pall upon her spirits; the mesmeric spell is broken; and presently all are chatting again, gaily oblivious to Art. By the way, there is the proprietor of the gallery, just before the three Renoir pastels. Is there anything about art exhibitions that more enlists the imagination than the study of the "dealers" themselves?
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