ed cold and conceited! The girls at
the club don't call her that. Do you know she has been there with me
twice?--yes, Lily! And you should have seen their eyes! One of them said
it was as good as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat
there, and laughed and talked with them--not a bit as if she were being
CHARITABLE, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did. They've
been asking ever since when she's coming back; and she's promised
me----oh!"

Miss Farish's confidences were cut short by the parting of the curtain on
the first TABLEAU--a group of nymphs dancing across flower-strewn sward
in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli's Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend
for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the
delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding
adjustment of the mental vision. To unfurnished minds they remain, in
spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but
to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary
world between fact and imagination. Selden's mind was of this order: he
could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the
spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry's TABLEAUX wanted none of the qualities
which go to the producing of such illusions, and under Morpeth's
organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with the rhythmic march
of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive curves of living flesh and
the wandering light of young eyes have been subdued to plastic harmony
without losing the charm of life.

The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had been
cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types. No one, for
instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry Fisher, with her
short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of her eyes, the
provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A brilliant Miss Smedden from
Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian's Daughter,
lifting her gold salver laden with grapes above the harmonizing gold of
rippled hair and rich brocade, and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed
the frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and
lashes, made a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a
curtained archway. Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar
of Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and
marble architecture; and a Watteau group