Betty? you say—do we not all know her? Does not her dimpled face peer out of the weekly papers, and do not their columns expose and magnify every little detail of her life—her fads, her fancies, and her follies? Cannot we see her night after night whisking her mazy skirts in the limelight, and opening the carnation folds of her lips to patter enchanting nonsense and pout promises brittle as pie crust? Dear little Betty! How her twinkling feet make merry, light as sea-foam frothing on shells; how our pulses throb and dance in pace with hers; how our ears dote on the fragile, cooing tones of her dainty voice as it coquettes with banalities, flirts with the very bars of melody that silly men have tried to make witty and pretty. But the prettiness and wittiness are Betty's; do we not all know that? Do we not know that the shiver of the violins is only quaint when Betty shudders at the whisper of a kiss, that the cyclone of strings and wind fades exquisitely, "like a rose in aromatic pain," simply because Betty, our whimsical dear, chooses to sigh for having shuddered? And when at last she cries, to think she sighs for that at which she shuddered, we all clap our hands to splitting—not, oh, not at the music, but in wild collective rapture over the vagaries of our Betty!
In this way I thought I knew her every trick and wile and whim, till I came to paint her picture, till one after another my charcoal lines were flicked from the canvas, and I succumbed to that paralysing sense of total defeat which is almost always the punishment of swollen ambition. What was wrong? I asked myself. What had I missed? The pose, the expression, the throb of motion? Weeks passed—then I worked again, made a new study, and consulted my cousin Laura. She knew something of dancing, and was at that time practising ballet steps, a necessary accompaniment—so she had been told—to her debût in comic opera.
"The face is perfection," she said. "The little droop in the left eye—she must have been born winking—and the upward curve at the corner of the lip, they couldn't be improved."
I shook my head. Laura's verdict was unsatisfactory. The human mind so often demands an opinion when it really wants a looking-glass.
"Perhaps if I could get more action—more of the warmth which goes with action——?"
"It would affect the flesh tint, certainly. You should see me pirouetting at Dupres'—a peony isn't in it."
"I should like to see you," I said, jumping at a probable solution of my difficulties, "particularly in daylight. One gets better to the core of——"
"With women," Laura interrupted, "it's safest to reject the core."
"Cynic. You admit the downiest have the hardest hearts—like peaches, eh?"
"I didn't mean to be cynical. You can avoid the hard part. It is better than choosing the human plantains that have none: smooth, soapy, insipid things, they clog in no time."