it’s me, and standing at a ballroom door as if I was swithering if I would go in, and no doubt I’d a funny look on my face, for when your grannie and me went down to his studio we never thought he really meant to do it.  And I was wearing that dress that’s hanging up in the attic cupboard.  Yes, ye can bring it down if ye put it back as ye find it.”  It was a dress of white ribbed Lille silk, with thick lace that ran in an upstanding frill round the tiny bodice and fell in flounces, held here and there with very pink roses, over a pert little scalloped bustle; she visualised it as she had often held it up for her mother to look at, who would go on knitting and say, with an affectation of a coldly critical air, “Mhm.  You may laugh at those old fashions, but I say yon’s not a bad dress.”

It was, Ellen reflected, just such a dress as the women wore in those strange worldly and passionate and self-controlled pictures of Alfred Stevens, the Belgian, of whose works there had once been a loan collection in the National Gallery.  Her imagination, which was working with excited power because of her grief and because her young body was intoxicated with lack of sleep, assumed for a moment pictorial genius, and set on the blank wall opposite the portrait of her mother as Alfred Stevens would have painted it.  Oh, she was lovely standing there in the shadow, with her red-gold hair and her white skin, on which there was a diffused radiance which might have been a reflection of her hair, and her little body springing slim and arched from the confusion of her skirts!  The sound of the “Blue Danube” was making her eyes bright and setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile of the Campbells.  Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.

Oh, she had been beautiful!  Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long grief of her mother’s.  That dress had never been thrown, though they had had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a professional, had wanted to paint her portrait.  An inspiration occurred to Ellen, and she bent down and said, “Mother, Richard and me’ll go to New York and see your portrait in the Museum there.”  The dying woman jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle