So that I first saw Prudence under romantic circumstances. She was sitting on a sugar-box with her bodice off. The combination of her charms and a red flannel under-garment was startling to the eye.
Prudence was occupied, it seemed, in a proceeding called "sitting for the neck and shoulders." The process was not a restful one, for Prudence had "nerves" and "fidgets" and a constant flow of anecdote. Mr. Baffin made free with expressions of entreaty, disapprobation, and despair.
For myself, I sat and stared at Prudence, being consumed with a great wonder. It wasn't the flannel which provoked this wonder. Red flannel is a hideous material, and highly moral and depressing at that. And I am sure that the spectacle of a poor, anæmic rat of an artist's model seated in "half-costume" on a sugar-box is not (in itself) an attractive one. But Prudence fascinated me as no human being had fascinated me for many days.
If any of you have felt the poignant, horrible appeal of Ophelia during the "mad scene," you will know how I felt about Prudence. Her spare, consumptive body was crowned by a neck and face and head as beautiful as any that ever were. But it was a beauty that was monstrous in its perfection, and that, therefore, hurt like some monstrosity of ugliness.
Prudence's beauty was the beauty of imbecility—that which Rossetti loved so much to draw. To look at her for long was like looking at some exotic, over-nurtured lily in a hot-house: one felt sick and restless and unmanned, and fell to longing for some robuster blossom on a hedgerow.
She had the genuine Rossetti neck—a thing which rose and swelled and died away in exquisite, maddening curves. She had the genuine Rossetti nose—straight, and small, and delicate, and sinful. She had hair, a full arm's length, that crept and clung and strayed and floated like the tendrils of a vine. She had wide, inscrutable eyes: wondering as a child's, yet filled with an awful something that was not of childhood. She had, above all else, a mouth which stung you with its beauty—blood-red lips that were open and moist and eager, like a lover's wound.
To all these charms she added the mind and speech of a mud-lark: the intelligence of a backward infant.
"Ow, Mr. Baffin," she was saying when I saw her first, "ow, Mr. Baffin, you do frighten me when you swear so. I will keep still: I will, reely. I won't fidget or move or talk—I won't even breathe—for a 'ole ten minnits. On'y I must tell you about me an' my sister an' the penny-in-the-slot machine. Mother give us tuppence, see, 'cos it was washin' day, an'—— ... Ow, now you're angry, Mr. Baffin. Down't be angry, Mr. Baffin. I am a wicked girl, I know I am, an' I will keep still: an' Gawd knows what's to become of me when my mother dies, an' everybody 'ates me, an' I am un'eppy."
The remainder of Prudence's observations were mingled with the sound of noisy sobs.
Mr. Baffin, that eminent painter, put down his palette and brush. "I'll wait," he said, "until you are dry again."