was. It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a
regular panorama of those occasions that were to minister to the view
from which I had so for a moment extracted a lyric inspiration. I see
Mrs. Brash on each of these occasions practically enthroned and
surrounded and more or less mobbed; see the hurrying and the nudging and
the pressing and the staring; see the people "making up" and introduced,
and catch the word when they have had their turn; hear it above all, the
great one--"Ah yes, the famous Holbein!"--passed about with that
perfection of promptitude that makes the motions of the London mind so
happy a mixture of those of the parrot and the sheep. Nothing would be
easier of course than to tell the whole little tale with an eye only for
that silly side of it. Great was the silliness, but great also as to this
case of poor Mrs. Brash, I will say for it, the good nature. Of course,
furthermore, it took in particular "our set," with its positive child-
terror of the _banal_, to be either so foolish or so wise; though indeed
I've never quite known where our set begins and ends, and have had to
content myself on this score with the indication once given me by a lady
next whom I was placed at dinner: "Oh it's bounded on the north by Ibsen
and on the south by Sargent!" Mrs. Brash never sat to me; she absolutely
declined; and when she declared that it was quite enough for her that I
had with that fine precipitation invited her, I quite took this as she
meant it; before we had gone very far our understanding, hers and mine,
was complete. Her attitude was as happy as her success was prodigious.
The sacrifice of the portrait was a sacrifice to the true inwardness of
Lady Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I divined, toward muffling
their domestic tension. All it was thus in her power to say--and I heard
of a few cases of her having said it--was that she was sure I would have
painted her beautifully if she hadn't prevented me. She couldn't even
tell the truth, which was that I certainly would have done so if Lady
Beldonald hadn't; and she never could mention the subject at all before