It seems to rise from the depths of one of the most comfortable chairs, on which an amber-haired white witch lies half perdu.
This is Trixy Beranger, Lady Beranger’s eldest marketable article, and a lovely thing it is.
She would serve for an exact model, as she lounges here, of the lovely Persian girl that our Poet Laureate saw in his excursion up the Tigris to “Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold.”
Trixy is a rare and radiant maiden—a bird of Paradise, over whom most men go mad, but do not care to wed, and to whom most women are cold, conscious that their good looks pale beside hers.
Gabrielle’s glowing beauty of coal-black tresses and creamy skin, waxes quite dim in Trixy’s proximity, and Baby’s cherub face and golden curls are nowhere, but Zai—well, Zai is a law unto herself.
Society last year had fallen down helplessly on its knees, and worshipped the débutante of the season, the Hon. Beatrix Beranger. From the Royalties downwards she was the rage.
They even likened her to every poetical saint in the calendar, and Trixy, not over-weighted with brains, and with her lovely head completely turned, in acknowledgment of the compliment, considers herself in duty bound towards mankind in general, and in fact a point of conscience, to “pose” accordingly.
She feels it incumbent on her never to allow herself to be out of drawing, as the R. A.’s have it, to be always (in spite of the discomfort of the thing) ready for an inspiration for a poet, or a study for a painter; so from sheer force of habit, that has become her second nature, she sinks perpetually into graceful attitudes, even if no one more important than Baby’s dachshund Bismark is by to admire.
She even arranges herself with due regard for the picturesque, when she retires to her own little sanctum for a siesta.
If Trixy’s beauty is in consequence marred just a little bit in the world by a soupçon of self-consciousness, it is not a matter of marvel. A Belgravian damsel can scarcely, with all the bonne volonté imaginable, personate Lalla Rookh, Idalian Aphrodite, Mary Anderson, the three Graces, a whole sisterhood of Muses, and herself to boot, without some one suffering in the transmogrification, and that some one is naturally—herself.