Miss Bretherton

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

It was the day of the private view at the Royal Academy. The great courtyard of Burlington House was full of carriages, and a continuous stream of guests was pressing up the red-carpeted stairs, over which presided some of the most imposing individuals known to the eyes of Londoners, second only to Her Majesty's beefeaters in glory of scarlet apparel. Inside, however, as it was not yet luncheon-time, the rooms were but moderately filled. It was possible to see the pictures, to appreciate the spring dresses, and to single out a friend even across the Long Gallery. The usual people were there: Academicians of the old school and Academicians of the new; R.A.'s coming from Kensington and the 'regions of culture,' and R.A.'s coming from more northerly and provincial neighbourhoods where art lives a little desolately and barely, in want of the graces and adornings with which 'culture' professes to provide her. There were politicians still capable—as it was only the first week of May—of throwing some zest into their amusements. There were art-critics who, accustomed as they were by profession to take their art in large and rapid draughts, had yet been unable to content themselves with the one meagre day allowed by the Academy for the examination of some 800 works, and were now eking out their notes of the day before by a few supplementary jottings taken in the intervals of conversation with their lady friends. There were the great dealers betraying in look and gait their profound, yet modest, consciousness that upon them rested the foundations of the artistic order, and that if, in a superficial conception of things, the star of an Academician differs from that of the man who buys his pictures in glory, the truly philosophic mind assesses matters differently. And, most important of all, there were the women, old and young, some in the full freshness of spring cottons, as if the east wind outside were not mocking the efforts of the May sun, and others still wrapped in furs, which showed a juster sense of the caprices of the English climate. Among them one might distinguish the usual shades and species: the familiar country cousin, gathering material for the over-awing of such of her neighbours as were unable to dip themselves every year in the stream of London; the women folk of the artist world, presenting greater varieties of type than the women of any other class can boast; and lastly, a sprinkling of the women of what calls itself 'London Society,' as well dressed, as well mannered, and as well provided with acquaintance as is the custom of their kind.

In one of the farther rooms, more scantily peopled as yet than the rest, a tall thin man was strolling listlessly from picture to picture, making every now and then hasty references to his catalogue, but in general eyeing all he saw with the look of one in whom familiarity with the sight before him had bred weariness, if not contempt. He was a handsome man, with a broad brow and a pleasant gentleness of expression....