“Get into the pose, Rosie,” said Hillier, “and let him see you.”
She got up on to the model stand. I stared at her and I stared at the
picture. I had such a funny little feeling in my heart. It was as though
someone softly plunged a sharp knife into it, but it was not an
unpleasant sensation at all, painful but strangely agreeable; and then
suddenly I felt quite weak at the knees. But now I do not know if I
remember Rosie in the flesh or in the picture. For when I think of her
it is not in the shirt and boater that I first saw her in, nor in any of
the other dresses I saw her in then or later, but in the white silk that
Hillier painted, with a black velvet bow in her hair, and in the pose he
had made her take.
I never exactly knew Rosie’s age, but reckoning the years out as well as
I can, I think she must have been thirty-five. She did not look anything
like it. Her face was quite unlined and her skin as smooth as a child’s.
I do not think she had very good features. They certainly had none of
the aristocratic distinction of the great ladies whose photographs were
then sold in all the shops; they were rather blunt. Her short nose was a
little thick, her eyes were smallish, her mouth was large; but her eyes
had the blue of cornflowers, and they smiled with her lips, very red and
sensual, and her smile was the gayest, the most friendly, the sweetest
thing I ever saw. She had by nature a heavy, sullen look, but when she
smiled this sullenness became on a sudden infinitely attractive. She had
no colour in her face; it was of a very pale brown except under the eyes
where it was faintly blue. Her hair was pale gold and it was done in the
fashion of the day high on the head with an elaborate fringe.
“She’s the very devil to paint,” said Hillier, looking at her and at his
picture. “You see, she’s all gold, her face and her hair, and yet she
doesn’t give you a golden effect, she gives you a silvery effect.”
I knew what he meant. She glowed, but palely, like the moon rather than
the sun, or if it was like the sun it was like the sun in the white mist
of dawn. Hillier had placed her in the middle of his canvas and she
stood, with her arms by her sides, the palms of her hands toward you and
her head a little thrown back, in an attitude that gave value to the
pearly beauty of her neck and bosom. She stood like an actress taking a
call, confused by unexpected applause, but there was something so
virginal about her, so exquisitely springlike, that the comparison was
absurd. This artless creature had never known grease paint or
footlights. She stood like a maiden apt for love offering herself
guilelessly, because she was fulfilling the purposes of Nature, to the
embraces of a lover. She belonged to a generation that did not fear a
certain opulence of line, she was slender, but her breasts were ample
and her hips well marked. When, later, Mrs. Barton Trafford saw the
picture she said it reminded her of a sacrificial heifer.