Читать книгу Aunt Olive in Bohemia онлайн

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An extremely inefficient but well-meaning young man of impeachable character visited Miss Talbot’s Academy for Young Ladies twice a week, and instructed the pupils in this art. Chalk drawings from casts were the style in vogue. It was considered an extremely advanced style. The chalk was kept in small glass tubes, it was shaken on to a pad, and applied to the paper with leather stumps, in the manner known as stippling. The poverty of the instruction, the horribly inartistic results produced, were unrecognized by Miss Mason. Chalk representations of plaster pears, apples, and floreate designs were produced by her at the rate of one a fortnight, and were laid carefully away in a large portfolio with tissue paper between to keep the chalk from rubbing.

Among the pupils at Miss Talbot’s Academy had been a girl—one Peggy O’Hea. Her father was a portrait painter of some note. Miss Talbot had hesitated at introducing this girl; daughter of a Bohemian—all artists were Bohemian in Miss Talbot’s eyes—into her select establishment, but the fact that her father was a yearly exhibitor at that most respectable institution the Royal Academy, and that her uncle was a Dean, induced Miss Talbot to overlook Bohemia. She kept, however, a strict guard over Miss O’Hea’s conversation with the other pupils, a guard Peggy invariably evaded; and curled up on her bed in her nightdress, her arms clasped round her knees, she would hold forth in glowing terms regarding her father’s studio and the artists who frequented it. She had in her secret heart a distinct contempt for the chalk drawings; but she was a generous little soul, and refrained from putting her thoughts into words.