uitar, a small one, of lemon-coloured pear wood,
curiously inlaid: Whistler got it for her in one of those old pawn
shops near the London wharves, and we used to wonder what happy
sailor, burnt and eager for the town, had brought it for what waiting
girl all the long miles, and how it had crept at last, ashamed and
stained, into that dingy three-balled tomb of so many hopes and
keepsakes. He sketched her in charcoal, dressed (he would have it) in
black, with a Spanish comb in her hair and the guitar on a broad
ribbon of strange deep Chinese blue; behind her, on an aerially
slender perch, stands a gaudy Mexican parrot. It does not look like
her to us who know her well (though, curiously enough, all strangers
consider it an extremely fine likeness) but as a _tour de force_ it is
remarkable, and amongst the plain, Saxon furnishings of the Island
living-room it stands out with an extraordinary vividness--an
unmistakable bit of Southern Europe, the perfectly conscious
sophistication of old cities and sunny, secret streets, worn uneven
and discoloured before Raleigh started across seas.

Roger never liked it, I believe, and I have always suspected the
impish James of deliberately putting us face to face with Margarita's
foreign strain and the tiny, deep gulf that cut her off, in some parts
of her nature, so hopelessly from us. And he made us see it, too, that
Puck of all painters, even as he had intended, and we were forced
to thank him for it, for it was too beautiful to have gone undone, and
he knew it. And Jimmie's dead, worse luck, and one of his most devoted
collectors told me last week that he really thought the psychological
moment for selling out had arrived, for he'd never go any higher! And
we're all grass, that to-day is and to-morrow goes into the oven, and
there's no doubt of it, my brothers.

But how she used to sing _O sole mio_, with that sweet, piercing
Italian cry, a real _cri du coeur_ (except for the trifling fact
that there was no more heart in it, really, than there is in most
Italian singing! I suppose that while the art of song remains among
the children of men, that particular child who is able to throw his
voice most easily into what Mme. M----i used to call "ze frront of ze
face" and detach it from the throat, where the true feelings lie
gripped, will continue to thrill the other children with his or her
"heart in the voice!") And how she would drag the rhythm, deliciously,
intentionally, and shad