e or with real ultramarine at a guinea an
ounce, if you could afford it.

I did not break out into Pygmalionic enthusiasm, but I felt that I must
leave all else and study the line that started from the neck, and went
straight down to the heel, unimpeded by petty details or any of those
non-essentials which just mark the difference between the real in Nature
and the ideal in Art. The next day I began a picture of her which has
since found its way to America. My friend Legros chancing to look in
when she was sitting, so warmly appreciated her that I invited him to
come and make studies from her at my studio occasionally; of those I
have a very beautiful one drawn for his _bas-relief_ "_La Fontaine_,"
which many will remember having seen at one of the early exhibitions in
the Grosvenor Gallery.

Couldn't Browning be indignant when the British matron presumed to
misinterpret the artist's glow of enthusiasm! Doubly indignant, when the
matron took the shape of a patron or the title of a Royal Academician
with a vote on the Council of selection, or a hand on the Hanging
Committee.

"The impropriety lies in the objection," he would say, "and I have put
what I think of it in my Furini."[17]

Browning had a marked predilection for a certain chair in my studio. It
is a cross-breed between what the French call a _crapaud_ and we an
easy-chair. In this he was installed one afternoon, when Laura was
perched on the model-table, artificially supported, as best she could
be, to give me a flying position. I was at work on one of two companion
pictures which, for want of a better title, I had called "The
Cloud-Compeller" and "The Cloud-Dispeller." In the first a deep-toned
figure gathers the rolling clouds together; in the second, a brighter
child of the skies peeps out from behind them.

"You might take some lines from Shelley's 'Cloud' for those pictures,"
suggested Browning.

"Yes--Shelley's Cloud," I answered. "To be sure--Let me see--Oh yes, it
is one of those beautiful poems I know, but can't remember."

"Oh," he began, leaning back in the easy-chair--"Don't you remember?

"'I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bring light shades----'"

And once started, he recited the whole poem. Recited is scarcely the
word. He simply told us all about "The daughter of the earth and the
nursling of the sky," and he conjured up, with the slightest of
emphasis, pictures of "the wh