ow irritated, till you approach a frenzy bordering on madness.
For you like to know the sort of creature you are dealing with--a
painter especially, since his fame hangs on his knowledge--hence these
ruminations round Betty.

Betty? you say--do we not all know her? Does not her dimpled face peer
out of the weekly papers, and do not their columns expose and magnify
every little detail of her life--her fads, her fancies, and her follies?
Cannot we see her night after night whisking her mazy skirts in the
limelight, and opening the carnation folds of her lips to patter
enchanting nonsense and pout promises brittle as pie crust? Dear little
Betty! How her twinkling feet make merry, light as sea-foam frothing on
shells; how our pulses throb and dance in pace with hers; how our ears
dote on the fragile, cooing tones of her dainty voice as it coquettes
with banalities, flirts with the very bars of melody that silly men have
tried to make witty and pretty. But the prettiness and wittiness are
Betty's; do we not all know that? Do we not know that the shiver of the
violins is only quaint when Betty shudders at the whisper of a kiss,
that the cyclone of strings and wind fades exquisitely, "like a rose in
aromatic pain," simply because Betty, our whimsical dear, chooses to
sigh for having shuddered? And when at last she cries, to think she
sighs for that at which she shuddered, we all clap our hands to
splitting--not, oh, not at the music, but in wild collective rapture
over the vagaries of our Betty!

In this way I thought I knew her every trick and wile and whim, till I
came to paint her picture, till one after another my charcoal lines were
flicked from the canvas, and I succumbed to that paralysing sense of
total defeat which is almost always the punishment of swollen ambition.
What was wrong? I asked myself. What had I missed? The pose, the
expression, the throb of motion? Weeks passed--then I worked again, made
a new study, and consulted my cousin Laura. She knew something of
dancing, and was at that time practising ballet steps, a necessary
accompaniment--so she had been told--to her debut in comic opera.

"The face is perfection," she said. "The little droop in the left
eye--she must have been born winking--and the upward curve at the corner
of the lip, they couldn't be improved."

I shook my head. Laura's verdict was unsatisfactory. The human mind so
often demands an opinion when it really wants a looking-glass.

"Per