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Social Pictorial Satire by George Du Maurier
page 46 of 56 (82%)
lordly pineapple and lovely rose, down to the humble daisy and savory
radish. _I_ deal in vegetables, I suppose. Little that I ever find
seems to me fit for the table just as I see it; moreover, by dishing
it up raw I should offend many people and make many enemies, and
deserve to do so. I cook my green pease, asparagus, French beans,
Brussels sprouts, German sauerkraut, and even a truffle now and then,
so carefully that you would never recognise them as they were when I
first picked them in the social garden. And they do not recognise
themselves! Or even each other!

And I do my best to dish them up in good, artistic style. Oh that I
could arrange for you a truffle with all that culinary skill that
Charles Keene brought to the mere boiling of a carrot or a potato! He
is the _cordon bleu_ par excellence. The people I meet seem to me more
interesting than funny--so interesting that I am well content to draw
them as I see them, after just a little arrangement and a very
transparent disguise--and without any attempt at caricature. The
better-looking they are, the more my pencil loves them, and I feel
more inclined to exaggerate in this direction than in any other.

Sam Weller, if you recollect, was fond of "pootiness and wirtue." I
_so_ agree with him! I adore them both, especially in women and
children. I only wish that the wirtue was as easy to draw as the
pootiness.

But indeed for me--speaking as an artist, and also, perhaps, a little
bit as a man--pootiness is almost a wirtue in itself. I don't think I
shall ever weary of trying to depict it, from its dawn in the toddling
infant to its decline and setting and long twilight in the beautiful
old woman, who has known how to grow old gradually. I like to surround
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