It was a handsome, well-appointed carriage from whose front seat he had alighted, the back being occupied by two ladies of between twenty and thirty, who looked as if their costume had been copied from a disinterred bas-relief; so cold and neutral were their lines that they might have been lady visitors to the Grosvenor Gallery, instead of maidens to whom the word “aesthetic” was hardly known. For the Graeco-Roman extended to their hair, which stood out from their foreheads, looking singed and frizzed as if scorched by the burning thoughts that were in their brains; for even in those days there were ladies who delighted to belong to the pre-Raphaelic cum fleshly school of painting and poetry, and took pains to show by their uniform that they were of the blessed.
As the footman folded the steps and closed the door, the gentleman—to wit, Mr Perry-Morton, of Saint Agnes’, Park Road—posed himself in an artistic attitude with one arm upon the carriage-door, crossed one leg over the other, and gazed in the faces of his sisters, one delicately-gloved hand in correct harmony of tint playing with a cambric handkerchief, specked with toy flowers of the same tone.
As he posed himself, so did the two ladies. The nearer curled herself gracefully, all but the legs, in a pantherine style in the corner of the carriage, and looked at her brother sweetly through the frizz of hair, as if she were asking him to see if there were a parting. The further drooped over florally in a manner that in another ordinary being would have suggested crick in the neck, but here, as with her brother and sister, everything was so deliriously unstudied—or well studied—that she only gave the idea of a bending flower—say, a bud—or a pallid virgin and martyr upon painted glass.
“Oh, Lord!” said Magnus, aloud.
“Hush! don’t. Come along, though. Gently, man, or they’ll see us, and we shall have to talk to the girls.”
“I’m an ostrich,” said the artist; “my head is metaphorically buried in sand. Whatever my pursuers see, I am blind.”
As it happened a group of people came along, and under their cover the two young men escaped.
“He is an awful fool,” said Artingale, “but the people believe in him.”
“Bah! so they will in any lunatic who makes himself fashionably absurd. I’ll be reasonable, Harry, though that fellow has half driven me wild with his airs and patronage. He gave me a thumping price for one of my pictures, for he’s immensely rich. Then he had the impudence to want me to alter it—the composition of months of hard, honest study—and began to lecture me on art.”
“From his point of view.”