I am bound to say that my cousin Cecilia Combe had quite as much trouble with her household, her lady’s-maids were quite as inefficient, her housemaids quite as careless, and her cooks quite as fiery-tempered and unsober as those of “ordinary Christians,” in spite of Mr. Combe’s observation and manipulation of their bumps previous to engaging them.

I remember once, when I was sitting to Lawrence Macdonald for my bust, which was one of the first he ever executed, before he left Edinburgh to achieve fame and fortune as the most successful marble portrait-maker in Rome, an absurd instance of Mr. Combe’s insight into character occurred at my expense.

Macdonald was an intimate friend of the Combes, and I used to see him at their house very frequently, and Mr. Combe often came to the studio when I was sitting.  One day while he was standing by, grimly observing Macdonald’s absorbed manipulation of his clay, while I, the original clay, occupied the “bad eminence” of an artist’s studio throne, my aunt came in with a small paper bag containing raspberry tarts in her hand.  This was a dainty so peculiarly agreeable to me that, even at that advanced stage of my existence, those who loved me, or wished to be loved by me, were apt to approach me with those charming three-cornered puff paste propitiations.

As soon as I espied the confectioner’s light paper bag I guessed its contents, and, springing from my dignified station, seized on the tarts as if I had been the notorious knave of the nursery rhyme.  “There now, Macdonald, I told you so!” quoth Mr. Combe, and they both began to laugh; and so did I, with my mouth full of raspberry puff, for it was quite evident to me that my phrenological friend had impressed upon my artistic friend the special development of my organ of alimentiveness, as he politely called it, which I translated into the vulgate as “bump of greediness.”  In spite of my reluctance to sit to him, from the conviction that the thick outline of my features would turn the edge of the finest chisel that “ever yet cut breath,” and perhaps by dint of phrenology, Macdonald succeeded in making a very good bust of me; and some time after, to my great amusement, having seen me act in the “Grecian Daughter,” he said to me, “Oh, but what I want to do now is a statue of you.”

“Yes,” said I, “and I will tell you exactly where—­in the last scene, where I cover my face.”

“Precisely so!” cried my enthusiastic friend, and then burst out laughing, on seeing the trap I had laid for him; but he was a very honest man, and stood by his word.

The attitude he wished to represent in a statue was that when, having stabbed Dionysius, I raised the dagger toward heaven with one hand, and drew my drapery over my face with the other.  For my notion of heroic women has always been, I am afraid, rather base—­a sort of “They do not mind death, but they can not bear pinching;” and though Euphrasia might, could, would, and should stab the man who was about to murder her father, I have no idea that she would like to look at the man she had stabbed.  “O Jupiter, no blood!” is apt to be the instinct, I suspect, even in very villainous feminine natures, and those who are and those who are not cowards alike shrink from sights of horror.