It was not the likeness to Marilda which gave Cherry the sense of unfulfilled expectation and dissatisfaction. The lofty expression, the deep awe, the weird cloud-land grandeur that she had connected either with the sketch or her memory of it, had passed away from the finished oil-painting; and when she had called it small, it was not because it was cabinet sized, but because it was wanting in the sense of majesty that can be conveyed in a gem as well as in a colossus. What was to have been a wild scene of terror in the world of mists would look extravagant, and neither the pose of Brynhild's limbs nor the position of Sigurd's sword, approved themselves to her eye as correct drawing.
Brother and sister were both far too acute, and too well used to read each other's looks and tones, for fencing or disguise to be possible.
'You don't like it.'
'O Edgar!' much distressed, 'indeed there is a great deal very beautiful, but somehow I had imagined it different.'
'Oh, if you came with a preconceived notion.'
'Perhaps that's it,' said Cherry, peeping through her eye-lashes, as long ago at the great Achilles, and making them a sieve to divest the image before her of all that her eye would condemn in spite of herself.
'I see a great deal of beauty, but somehow I thought the whole would have been more finished,' she said.
'Not possible. A rude half developed myth is not in keeping with the precision of a miniature. Besides, the finish of Sigurd's armour throws back the vague beyond.'
Her feeling had been that the Pre-Raphaelitism of the hauberk was too like worsted stockings, and not in keeping with the Turneresque whirl of flame and smoke around the sleeping Valkyr; but the disloyalty of not admiring Edgar's picture was impossible to her loving spirit; she listened and looked through her eye-lashes, till though Brynhild's limbs were to her unassisted sense almost as uncomfortable as those of Achilles had been, he imparted a glamour, so that she thought she beheld it as it ought to have been, and believed it to be so great and deep a work of art that study alone could appreciate it.
'Yes, I see—I see it now—I could not before—but that is all the better!'