Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very
beautiful. Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom
Ellen had known all her life from her mother's anecdotes as spirited
girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women
in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was
sure to say: "You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl
in Edinburgh. Oh, Christina, you were!..." It was true, too, a French
artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery's ballroom at
Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a
portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New
York. Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for
though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more
out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur: "Och, it's me, and standing
at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt
I'd a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to
his studio we never thought he really meant to do it. And I was wearing
that dress that's hanging up in the attic cupboard. Yes, ye can bring it
down if ye put it back as ye find it." It was a dress of white ribbed
Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the
tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink
roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had
often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and
say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, "Mhm. You may laugh
at those old fashions, but I say yon's not a bad dress."

It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those
strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred
Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan
collection in the National Gallery. Her imagination, which was working
with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was
intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius,
and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred
Stevens would have painted it. Oh, she was lovely standing there in the
shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a
diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and
her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion o