She meant neither more nor less than that it would kill Lady Beldonald if I were to paint Mrs. Brash; for at this lurid light had we arrived in so short a space of time.  It was for me to decide whether my aesthetic need of giving life to my idea was such as to justify me in destroying it in a woman after all in most eyes so beautiful.  The situation was indeed sufficiently queer; for it remained to be seen what I should positively gain by giving up Mrs. Brash.  I appeared to have in any case lost Lady Beldonald, now too “upset”—­it was always Mrs. Munden’s word about her and, as I inferred, her own about herself—­to meet me again on our previous footing.  The only thing, I of course soon saw, was to temporise to drop the whole question for the present and yet so far as possible keep each of the pair in view.  I may as well say at once that this plan and this process gave their principal interest to the next several months.  Mrs. Brash had turned up, if I remember, early in the new year, and her little wonderful career was in our particular circle one of the features of the following season.  It was at all events for myself the most attaching; it’s not my fault if I am so put together as often to find more life in situations obscure and subject to interpretation than in the gross rattle of the foreground.  And there were all sorts of things, things touching, amusing, mystifying—­and above all such an instance as I had never yet met—­in this funny little fortune of the useful American cousin.  Mrs. Munden was promptly at one with me as to the rarity and, to a near and human view, the beauty and interest of the position.  We had neither of us ever before seen that degree and that special sort of personal success come to a woman for the first time so late in life.  I found it an example of poetic, of absolutely retributive justice; so that my desire grew great to work it, as we say, on those lines.  I had seen it all from the original moment at my studio; the poor lady had never known an hour’s appreciation—­which moreover, in perfect good faith, she had never missed.  The very first thing I did after inducing so unintentionally the resentful retreat of her protectress had been to go straight over to her and say almost without preliminaries that I should hold myself immeasurably obliged for a few patient sittings.  What I thus came face to face with was, on the instant, her whole unenlightened past and the full, if foreshortened, revelation of what among us all was now unfailingly in store for her.  To turn the handle and start that tune came to me on the spot as a temptation.  Here was a poor lady who had waited for the approach of old age to find out what she was worth.  Here was a benighted being to whom it was to be disclosed in her fifty-seventh year—­I was to make that out—­that she had something that might pass for a face.  She looked much more than her age, and was fairly frightened—­as if I had been trying on her some possibly heartless London