But look at his pictures of really great people--
how great _they_ are! There's plenty of ideal there. Take his Professor
Clyde; how clearly the man's history is written in those broad steady
strokes of the brush: the hard work, the endless patience, the fearless
imagination of the great _savant_! Or the picture of Mr. Domfrey--the man
who has felt beauty without having the power to create it. The very brush-
work expresses the difference between the two; the crowding of nervous
tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a
suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a delicate instrument the man
is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness." Mrs.
Mellish paused, blushing a little at the echo of her own eloquence. "My
advice is, don't let George Lillo paint you if you don't want to be found
out--or to find yourself out. That's why I've never let him do _me_; I'm
waiting for the day of judgment," she ended with a laugh.
Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering impatience
to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish. Lillo's
presence in New York--he had come over from Paris for the first time in
twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures--gave to the
analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been
furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not
unapt; for in Lillo's curiously detached existence it is difficult to
figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures.
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