“Well, yes, rather,” admitted the British matron. “I wanted to be done as just me; but never mind, you shall have the job all the same.”
Said Willow Pattern (gasping), “I beg your pardon.”
Said the British matron, “Now get out your paints, child, and do me.”
So far there has been nothing said of Lilla. Lilla, by the irony which often rules in names, is a sallow, shady-lipped girl. Her hair is dressed in one thin plait worn round the head, and I always see her as I last saw her—sitting before a cup of cold tea, with the milk like a mackerel sky on it. She was talking to another girl. I did not hear their talk, being myself in conversation with the fourth person present, but I noticed the singular beauty of Lilla’s voice, and here and there such fragments of quaint inversion as, “Hither came,” “I like it much,” “Think you?”
Next of kin, mentally, to the girl who goes in for art is the girl who goes in for art-criticism. This girl sits much with her hands folded and reads reviews not only of books, but of pictures and concerts. There is such a girl in London of to-day who never knows how much or how little she has enjoyed a concert until after perusal of the subsequent morning’s paper. This girl is aged sixteen.
Going in for Art criticism
There is such another girl in London upon whom a perfect raid is made by persons humorous when the Academy exhibition of pictures opens. Most people, not professional artists, according to this girl, go about picture-exhibitions idiotically admiring everything. Nothing will induce her to believe that this spirit of admiration is perhaps not so much the result of idiotcy as it is the result of a clear consciousness on the parts of those feeling it that they lack all painting ability and so may fairly regard, with mingled wonder and delight, the work of persons who, to state the case for them at the lowest, do not lack all painting ability.
Sentimental nonsense that, according to the girl who goes in for art-criticism, and who points out that here the projection of a shadow is obviously wrong, there the execution is flabby; here the design is feeble; there the treatment of the lights, while striking, is technically questionable. If all that came from a girl at first hand, one would lose all hope of her, but every word of it has been read where most of us can read it, and a certain naïveté attaches to the pompous retailing of it, which naïveté is as a saving grace; howbeit there are persons who will not recognise this fact. It is said of a great painter living that he “foams at the mouth” when a certain young girl is named, because she once told him for his encouragement that a picture of his was in her deeming “beautifully felt;” and there is a pianist of note who vows that he will remember till his death that a young English girl informed him that he had “a beautiful finger.” The jargon of art on the lips of young girls apparently fails to please.