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The Beldonald Holbein
The Beldonald Holbein
CHAPTER I
Mrs. Munden had not yet been to my studio on so good a pretext as when she first intimated that it would be quite open to me—should I only care, as she called it, to throw the handkerchief—to paint her beautiful sister-in-law. I needn’t go here more than is essential into the question of Mrs. Munden, who would really, by the way, be a story in herself. She has a manner of her own of putting things, and some of those she has put to me—! Her implication was that Lady Beldonald hadn’t only seen and admired certain examples of my work, but had literally been prepossessed in favour of the painter’s “personality.” Had I been struck with this sketch I might easily have imagined her ladyship was throwing me the handkerchief. “She hasn’t done,” my visitor said, “what she ought.”
“Do you mean she has done what she oughtn’t?”
“Nothing horrid—ah dear no.” And something in Mrs. Munden’s tone, with the way she appeared to muse a moment, even suggested to me that what she “oughtn’t” was perhaps what Lady Beldonald had too much neglected. “She hasn’t got on.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“Well, to begin with, she’s American.”
“But I thought that was the way of ways to get on.”
“It’s one of them. But it’s one of the ways of being awfully out of it too. There are so many!”
“So many Americans?” I asked.
“Yes, plenty of them,” Mrs. Munden sighed. “So many ways, I mean, of being one.”
“But if your sister-in-law’s way is to be beautiful—?”