Sometimes I feel that I have dwelt overmuch on the subject of Lillian’s beauty; again, I feel that I have said very little. It is such a tremendous thing when considered in its relation to her material being—such a baffling thing. She is not richly proportioned. In height five feet four and one half inches, her weight is one hundred and ten pounds. True, her slender feet are small, her limbs shapely; but her arms are full long, her expressive hands rather large, her shoulders narrow, her bust that of a young girl. It is strange, but these very defects—defects in another—add to the charm that surrounds her like an aureola. Her face—I cannot write about her face—I suppose the classic purist might take it to pieces, discovering a variety of faults. Let him do so. In doing it he will miss Lillian altogether—her beauty and the magic of it. It has often been likened to music, the strains of Debussy, which is well enough, as far as it goes, and I have found it in the heart cry of Mascagni’s “Intermezzo,” in the “Eve of St. Agnes,” in the dying fall of the “Londonderry Air.” To say that it is spiritual only partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a haunting eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors—the face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone. Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you feel the magic working. They have glimpsed “Diana’s silver horn,” and are forever changed.
“CAMILLE”
VII
A FEW NOTES
In my notebook of this time I find these entries:
March 31, 1931: She has returned from a brief stay at Atlantic City. “I read ‘Arrowsmith,’” she said. “I think it a fine book.
“I remembered something while I was there: something from my childhood: I remembered Papa taking Dorothy and me there, once; I think we stayed there overnight. I know we paddled in the water on the beach. How strange, when my memory is so poor, that this should come back to me, after all these years. I think we went from New York, so it must have been just after Baltimore, when I was about five.”
No date: How tolerant she is! Whatever her belief or habits, she never urges them upon others, or tries to disintegrate theirs. She never smoked a cigarette in her life, but for years she has lived in a drift of tobacco, without objection or criticism. She drinks nothing stronger than mild wine, but provides generously for her guests.
April 5: Artists are always wanting to paint Lillian. Just now she is posing for Sorine, the distinguished Russian painter who did the Pavlowa which hangs in the Luxembourg. Lillian’s portrait is to hang there, he says, and some day in the Louvre. I saw it today, with her. It is vividly, delicately done.
No date: Today she said: “I attended a symphony concert, last night, with some friends. In the box with us was Gabrilowitsch. I thought of what the music meant to him that it did not mean to me. What he heard that missed me entirely. Musicians have an entire world of their own. No other art has that in the same degree. Science has it, I suppose. But music seems different,—of a world still farther removed.”