masterpiece. He passed hours in the galleries and churches,
posturing, musing, and gazing; he talked more than ever about the
beautiful, but he never put brush to canvas. We had all subscribed, as
it were, to the great performance; but as it never came off people began
to ask for their money again. I was one of the last of the faithful; I
carried devotion so far as to sit to him for my head. If you could have
seen the horrible creature he made of me, you would admit that even a
woman with no more vanity than will tie her bonnet straight must have
cooled off then. The man didn't know the very alphabet of drawing! His
strong point, he intimated, was his sentiment; but is it a consolation,
when one has been painted a fright, to know it has been done with
peculiar gusto? One by one, I confess, we fell away from the faith, and
Mr. Theobald didn't lift his little finger to preserve us. At the first
hint that we were tired of waiting, and that we should like the show to
begin, he was off in a huff. 'Great work requires time, contemplation,
privacy, mystery! O ye of little faith!' We answered that we didn't
insist on a great work; that the five-act tragedy might come at his
convenience; that we merely asked for something to keep us from yawning,
some inexpensive little _lever de rideau_. Hereupon the poor man took
his stand as a genius misconceived and persecuted, an _ame meconnue_, and
washed his hands of us from that hour! No, I believe he does me the
honour to consider me the head and front of the conspiracy formed to nip
his glory in the bud--a bud that has taken twenty years to blossom. Ask
him if he knows me, and he will tell you I am a horribly ugly old woman,
who has vowed his destruction because he won't paint her portrait as a
pendant to Titian's Flora. I fancy that since then he has had none but
chance followers, innocent strangers like yourself, who have taken him at
his word. The mountain is still in labour; I have not heard that the
mouse has been born. I pass him once in a while in the galleries, and he
fixes his great dark eyes on me with a sublimity of indifference, as if I
were a bad copy of a Sassoferrato! It is a long time ago now that I
heard that he was making studies for a Madonna who was to be a _resume_
of all the other Madonnas of the Italian school--like that antique Venus
who borrowed a nose from one great image and an ankle from another. It's
certainly a masterly idea. The parts ma