of lute-playing comedians,
lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.

Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in Selden,
leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty Farish's
running commentary--"Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!" or: "That must be
Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple"--did not break the spell of
the illusion. Indeed, so skilfully had the personality of the actors been
subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of
the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain
suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the
portrait of Miss Bart.

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality--the
unanimous "Oh!" of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of
Reynolds's "Mrs. Lloyd" but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily
Bart. She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like
her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to
be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into,
Reynolds's canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams
of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid
setting--she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo's
Cleopatra--had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her
unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without
distracting accessories of dress or surroundings. Her pale draperies,
and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to
relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot
to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of
soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden
always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with
her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to
see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her
little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of
which her beauty was a part.

"Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn't
a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!"

These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned Van
Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden's shoulder
whenever the parting of the curtains presented any exceptional
opportunity for t