“You may say what you will,” he said to his sisters, “and I allow my principles would not answer with girls. You have nothing else to look to, to get on in the world. But a man can take that sort of thing in his own hands, and if one gets beauty that’s enough. It is more distinction than anything else. I shall insist upon beauty, but nothing more.”
“It all depends on what you call beauty,” said Miss Phyllis. “You can make anything beauty if you stand by it and swear to it. Marrying a painter isn’t at all a bad way. He paints you over and over again till you get recognized as a Type, and then it doesn’t matter what other people say.”
“You can’t call Effie a Type,” said the young lady who called herself Doris—her name in fact was a more humble one: but then not even the Herald’s College has anything to do with Christian names.
“She may not be a Type—but if you had seen her as I did in the half light, coming out gradually as one’s eyes got used to it like something developing in a camera—Jove! She was like a Burne-Jones—not strong enough for the blessed Damozel or that sort of thing, but sad and sweet like—like—” Fred paused for a simile, “like a hopeless maiden in a procession winding down endless stairs, or—standing about in the wet, or—If she had not been dressed in nineteenth-century costume.”
“He calls that nineteenth-century costume!” said Phyllis with a mixture of sympathy and scorn.
“Poor Effie is not dressed at all,” said the other sister. “She has clothes on, that is all: but I could make her look very nice if she were in my hands. She has a pretty little figure, not spoiled at all—not too solid like most country girls but just enough to drape a pretty flowing stuff or soft muslin upon. I should turn her out that you would not know her if she trusted herself to me.”
“For goodness’ sake let her alone,” cried Fred; “don’t make a trollop of my little maiden. Her little stiffness suits her. I like her just so, in her white frock.”
“You should have been born a milliner, Dor.”
“Perhaps I was—and papa’s money has thwarted nature. If he should ever lose it all, which I suppose is on the cards——”
“Oh, very much on the cards,” said Fred.