your
photograph may go into boudoirs. Imagine Gladys opening the album to
AEnone; 'Now I will show you _him_.' And there you sit, leering at
their radiant sweetness, hat on, and a cigar reeking between your
fingers.

"No, George, a man should go very softly to a photographer's, and he
should sit before the camera with reverence in his heart and in his
attitude, as if he were in the presence of the woman he loved."

He turned to Mrs Harborough's portrait, looked at it, hesitated, looked
again, and passed on.

"I often think we do not take this business of photography in a
sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage:
you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe. I know of one man
who has an error of youth of this kind on his mind--a fancy-dress
costume affair, Crusader or Templar--of which he is more ashamed than
many men would be of the meanest sins. For sometimes the camera has
its mordant moods, and amazes you by its saturnine estimate of your
merits. This man was perhaps a little out of harmony with the garments
of chivalry, and a trifle complacent and vain at the time. But the
photograph of him is so cynical and contemptuous, so merciless in its
exposure of his element of foolishness, that we may almost fancy the
spook of Carlyle had got mixed up with the chemicals upon the film.
Yet it never really dawned upon him until he had distributed this
advertisement of his little weakness far and wide, that the camera had
called him a fool to his face. I believe he would be glad now to buy
them all back at five pounds a copy.

"This of Minnie Hobson is a work of art. Bless me, the girl must be
thirty-seven or thirty-eight now, and just look at her! These
photographers have got a trick now, if your face is one of the long
kind, of raising the camera, bending your head forward, and firing down
at you. So our Minnie becomes quite chubby again. Then, this thing
has been retouched." My uncle peered into the photograph. "It seems
to me it is pretty nearly all retouching. For instance, if you look at
the eye, that high light is not perfectly even; that was touched in on
the negative with a pencil. Then about the neck of our Minnie I have
observed certain bones, just the slightest indication of her
collar-bone, George, but that has disappeared under the retoucher's
pencil. Then the infantile smoothness of her cheek, and the
beautifully-rounded outline, is produced by the retoucher ca