All Carlin’s best groups and figures were, like this, copies from nature. When he attempted anything else, he unconsciously copied the works of others or he failed.
“I’m so glad you made that suggestion about the water-carrier,” he said, taking up his sketch. “I find it is always better for me to put considerable action into my figures. If I give them a simple pose, they are stupid. Would you have her looking up or down?”
“Let the little minx look up, by all means,” the Signora said. “She’s a good girl, enough, as a butterfly or a bird may be good. There isn’t enough of her for a down look; but that saucy little coquettish up-look is rather piquant. Besides, it is true to her nature. If she thought any one were admiring her, she wouldn’t have subtilty enough to look down and pretend not to see, and she wouldn’t have self-control enough, either. She would wish to
know just how much she was admired, and to attitudinize as long as it paid her vanity to do so. Bianca, my dear, there is our bell. Your father and Isabel must have come home.”
They went down again through the complicated passages and stairs, where arched windows and glimpses into vaulted rooms and into gardens crowded with green made them seem far from home.
“How beautiful orange-trees are!” Bianca exclaimed, stopping to look at one that filled roundly a window seen at the end of a long passage. “It has the colors of Paradise, I fancy. I don’t like yellow to wear, not even gold; but I like it for everything else.”
“Wait till you see the snow on an orange-tree, if you would see it at its perfection,” was the reply. “Perhaps you might wait many years, to be sure. I saw it once, and shall never forget. A light snow came down over the garden a few winters since, and dropped its silvery veil over the orange-trees. Fancy the dark green leaves and the golden fruit through that glittering lace! I had thought that our northern cedars and pines, with their laden boughs, were beautiful; but the oranges were exquisite. Would you believe that our kitchen door was so near?”
Isabel ran to meet the two, all in a breeze.
“Hurry on your things in two minutes to go to the Vatican,” she said. “Here are the cards. Monsignor forgot to send them, and has only now given them to us. The carriage is at the door.”
Off came the summer muslins in a trice, and in little more than the time allowed the three ladies tripped, rustling, down the stairs, in their black silk trains and black veils.