Yet already he
'progresses like a giantess,' has attracted some attention in the
Academy, and will directly be sent to Rome. But the idea! I know him too
well! The other night I heard him criticizing Michael Angelo! and when I
gave him an engraving of that delicious Psyche of Theed's to admire, the
creature talked as if she were a manikin or a robed skeleton! Is there
nothing due to the idea, Acajou? 'The idea!' dear me, why he didn't
exactly know what the _idea_ was! So he'll go trolling about the Louvre
and the Luxembourg gallery, the Pitti palace and all Rome, and his mind
will be as full of elbows and collar bones as the catacombs; he'll talk
to you of the Grecian line of beauty and of 'pose,' and sketch you such
a glorious arm or ankle that you, fair lady, wouldn't know it from your
own! But do you see a single softened line in his own face? Has he ever
drunk deep draughts from old fountains of poesy? Has he ever thought of
the Vatican library--even though to long is all he may do? Oh no! He
says mythology is a wornout dream, and insulting to a Christian age;
that it's all well enough to know Jupiter and Bacchus (Silenus too?) and
Venus and the head men back there, but this century wants originality,
progress! Oh, pshaw!

Oh, but I was saying that Our Lady stood over the half moon, and
Henrietta sat below it, with that soft cashmere morning dress, fighting
all around her to see which fold should cling most lovingly to her
graceful form. It was all a delicious poem to me, and if I were Horace,
you would have had a splendid ode. Oh, well!

'Why, what a Joseph he is!' said Henrietta, waking me out of this
reverie.

'Oh,' said I, starting, 'how did you know that?'

'Only conjecture, my dear friend; but when we see a man with his eyes
fixed in that ghostly way, and his mustaches and all in perfect repose,
we reasonably imagine that he's seeing visions; and I suppose you'll
come flaming out presently with some dreams that shall have, for remote
consequences, a throne in some Eastern paradise, and a princess,
perhaps--who knows?'

'Who knows?' echoed I; 'but go on, Hypatia.'

'Oh yes! where shall I begin? Oh! there is Penhurst Lane, girls, you
remember?'

'The raven?' said Bertha.

'No,' said Fanny, 'that is Mr. Rawdon. Penhurst Lane is an idealist.'

'A _very_ idealist, just so,' returned Harry. 'Well, the way I've been a
martyr to that man's caprice is perfectly heart-rending. He came of some
gorgeous family