letters, each of which she showed me. They so told to our imagination
her terrible little story that we were quite prepared--or thought we
were--for her going out like a snuffed candle. She resisted, on her
return to her original conditions, less than a year; the taste of the
tree, as I had called it, had been fatal to her; what she had contentedly
enough lived without before for half a century she couldn't now live
without for a day. I know nothing of her original conditions--some minor
American city--save that for her to have gone back to them was clearly to
have stepped out of her frame. We performed, Mrs. Munden and I, a small
funeral service for her by talking it all over and making it all out. It
wasn't--the minor American city--a market for Holbeins, and what had
occurred was that the poor old picture, banished from its museum and
refreshed by the rise of no new movement to hang it, was capable of the
miracle of a silent revolution; of itself turning, in its dire dishonour,
its face to the wall. So it stood, without the intervention of the ghost
of a critic, till they happened to pull it round again and find it mere
dead paint. Well, it had had, if that's anything, its season of fame,
its name on a thousand tongues and printed in capitals in the catalogue.
We hadn't been at fault. I haven't, all the same, the least note of
her--not a scratch. And I did her so in intention! Mrs. Munden
continues to remind me, however, that this is not the sort of rendering
with which, on the other side, after all, Lady Beldonald proposes to
content herself. She has come back to the question of her own portrait.
Let me settle it then at last. Since she _will_ have the real
thing--well, hang it, she shall!