Miss Wilhelmina sprang from her seat, and bouncing into a closet, soon returned with a large portfolio, which she placed on the table before Flora. “There are my treasures; you can examine them at your leisure.”
Flora did not expect anything delicate or beautiful, but she was perfectly astonished, not at the skill and taste displayed in these drawings, but at the extraordinary want of it—nothing could be worse, or indeed so eccentrically bad. The first specimen of Miss Carr’s talents as an artist which she drew from the splendid velvet-covered portfolio puzzled her not a little. What the picture was meant for, Flora, for the life of her, could not tell, until glancing down to the bottom of the sheet, she read with great difficulty the following explanation, written in a vile hand:—
“Portrait of the Incomparable Muff, taken while picking her bone at breakfast.”
It was a good thing she had discovered a key to the hieroglyphic, for Miss Carr’s keen eyes were fixed intently upon her, as if they were reading her inmost soul.
“Is it not beautiful?” she cried, anticipating Flora’s admiration.
“Muff is a very pretty animal,” said Flora evasively.
“Muff pretty!” exclaimed Miss Carr indignantly, “who ever thought of insulting Muff by calling her pretty! She is exquisite—the perfection of her species. I have, in that spirited picture, hit her off to the life. Look at the action of that tail—the life-like grasp of those paws. You might almost fancy you heard her growl over the delicious broiled mutton-bone.”
Flora thought the picture would have suited the Ornithorhyncus paradoxus quite as well as the incomparable Muff. The drawing was too bad to praise; she could not flatter, and she abhorred quizzing.
Miss Carr waited for her answer. Flora was dumb-foundered; fortunately the offended vanity of the artist soon relieved her from the painful and embarrassing silence.
“I perceive that you are no judge of good paintings, Mrs. Lyndsay, or you must see some merit in the one before you. I showed that sketch to an Italian artist of celebrity when I was at Rome; he said, ‘That it was worthy of the original,’ which I considered no mean praise.”