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The table was undraped, save at the far end, where sat, with his back to the glowing stove, a burly, thick-set man, attired in an undress military uniform. He appeared to be about forty years of age; he wore his hair cropped short, and his face was partially hidden by a heavy, unkempt beard and moustache.
June heat had followed fast upon the balmy breath of May, and though the air at dawn was still iced with crystal dew, the sun that shone through the open windows of the little chapel, burned fiercely on the unpainted pine seats, the undraped reading-desk of the pulpit, the tarnished gilt pipes of the cabinet organ within the chancel railing.
The drawing-room being thrown open, the vast antechamber of which the doors had been removed to be seen, laden with flowers at the sides, the principal staircase of the mansion, over which swept, now shaken out to their full extent, the long trains, whose silky weight seemed to give a backward pull to the undraped busts of the women in the course of that pretty ascending movement which brought them into view, little by little, till the complete flower of their splendour was reached.
Grainger walked sideways down the narrow hall. A bunch of burnt umber hair and a sea-green eye appeared in the crack of a door. A long, white, undraped arm came out, barring the way. "So glad you came, Ricky, instead of any of the others," said the eye. "Light a cigarette and give it to me. Going to take me to dinner? Fine. Go into the front room till I finish dressing.
Some of my most precious rugs adorned the floor, but the windows were absolutely undraped. There were a few old chairs scattered about, but no other article of furniture except an improvised wash-stand, and a clumsy, portable tin bath-tub which leaned nonchalantly against the foot of the bed.
And on but rare occasions was the great central door undraped with the sepulchral insignia which proclaimed that a Mass for the dead was in prospect or in progress. Sometimes the sable valance and portières were heavily trimmed and fringed with silver; at others there was only the scantiest display of time-worn black cloth. The humblest funeral was affecting and impressive.
It reminds one, not of the mood of Poe's verse, but of the spirit of the paintings of George Frederick Watts. It is allied in some way, in my mind, with his "Love and Life," though but a single draped figure within doors, and "Love and Life" are undraped figures, climbing a mountain. The boy, having said good-by, remembers the lady Annabel. It is a crisis after the event.
At this time, it seems, Savonarola was asserting his conviction that "in houses where young maidens dwelt it was dangerous and improper to retain pictures wherein there were undraped figures."
The cutting off of heads in fact I see nothing remarkable in that!" Then, seeing the expression of the reverend gentleman's face, he added quickly: "But when it comes to teaching the children to stick cigarettes in the mouths there I agree with you, it is a bit too strong!" The Near East had, in fact, momentarily undraped itself.
Thus a Frenchman, viewing the undraped statues which bedizen his native galleries of art, either enjoys them in a purely aesthetic fashion which is seldom possible save when he is in liquor or confesses frankly that he doesn't like them at all; whereas the visiting Americano is so powerfully shocked and fascinated by them that one finds him, the same evening, in places where no respectable man ought to go.
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