“But I knew a lady once—”
“Still another lady?”
“A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever ‘the idea of her life’ came into my ‘study of imagination’, I invariably saw her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself.”
“Well it is, isn’t it—if one puts a little effort into it to make it right? It is in the setting—isn’t it—that one has one’s opportunity to express what you call the self. It is in one’s husband, children, friends, and one’s home and habits and things and so on.”
“Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about the setting. Wherever she was, seemed to be the centre of the picture. She always seemed to frame.”
“What an attitudinizer she must have been!”
“She was not. It was only, I think, that she seemed to bring out and accentuate everything near her that harmonized with her own vibrant and articulate life. When I saw her in her drawing-room, it framed her; and she appeared as fine and finished as if she had stepped from a canvas of Watteau’s. Her books and pictures and tapestries became as intimately hers as her garments, so that I have felt her almost visibly present in that room, even when she was not there. Sometimes, in a perverse mood, I have said, ‘This is all a pose’; and, trying to go behind the elaborate expressiveness of her artificial surroundings and to tease her out of perfection, I have gone on rough walks with her in woods and in the open, half hoping that she might revert to the inarticulate pathos of Nature. But the instant she stepped from the frame of art she stepped into the frame of the landscape; the greensward spread itself before her like Raleigh’s cloak; groves offered themselves for a background; and I finally concluded that if she came up out of the sea, like Botticelli’s Cytherea, the sea would clothe her and her pearly radiance appear but an extension of the lustrous nacre of some deep-sea shell.”
“You are fanciful,” said Cornelia.
“I am not fanciful,” I replied. “I express just as simply as I can with words my sense of the quite blessed outwardness and availability of this lady’s self. I don’t think she knew it, but—”
“But that shows how ignorant you are of women,” she said, and swept me again sidelong with her gray eyes.