Chapter 5

Well, that's what, on the whole and in spite of everything, it really was.
It has dropped into my memory a rich little gallery of pictures, a regular
panorama of those occasions that were to minister to the view from which I
had so for a moment extracted a lyric inspiration. I see Mrs. Brash on
each of these occasions practically enthroned and surrounded and more or
less mobbed; see the hurrying and the nudging and the pressing and the
staring; see the people "making up" and introduced, and catch the word when
they have had their turn; hear it above all, the great one--"Ah yes, the
famous Holbein!"--passed about with that perfection of promptitude that
makes the motions of the London mind so happy a mixture of those of the
parrot and the sheep. Nothing would be easier of course than to tell the
whole little tale with an eye only for that silly side of it. Great was
the silliness, but great also as to this case of poor Mrs. Brash, I will
say for it, the good nature. Of course, furthermore, it took in particular
"our set," with its positive child-terror of the banal, to be either so
foolish or so wise; though indeed I've never quite known where our set
begins and ends, and have had to content myself on this score with the
indication once given me by a lady next whom I was placed at dinner: "Oh
it's bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the south by Sargent! Mrs. Brash
never sat to me; she absolutely declined; and when she declared that it was
quite enough for her that I had with that fine precipitation invited her, I
quite took this as she meant it; before we had gone very far our
understanding, hers and mine, was complete. Her attitude was as happy as
her success was prodigious. The sacrifice of the portrait was a sacrifice
to the true inwardness of Lady Beldonald, and did much, for the time, I
divined, toward muffling their domestic tension. All it was thus in her
power to say--and I heard of a few cases of her having said it--was that
she was sure I would have painted her beautifully if she hadn't prevented
me. She couldn't even tell the truth, which was that I certainly would
have done so if Lady Beldonald hadn't; and she never could mention the
subject at all before that personage. I can only describe the affair,
naturally, from the outside, and heaven forbid indeed that I should try too
closely to, reconstruct the possible strange intercourse of these good
friends at home.

My anecdote, however, would lose half the point it may have to show were I
to omit all mention of the consummate turn her ladyship appeared gradually
to have found herself able to give her deportment. She had made it
impossible I should myself bring up our old, our original question, but
there was real distinction in her manner of now accepting