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With Pen and Pencil 17 |
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(my eye) it jars upon all their conventional sensibilities.
Little Billee, having won his inamorata, absorbed in his art, feels that his whole duty is done when he supplies her material wants and provides the society of his beloved mother and sister for her companionship.
It all grates upon Trilby's nerves, and she loathes the smug proprieties and narrow horizon and only gets a glimpse of fun now and then when she ventures to shock them. The atmosphere is suffocating and she finally runs away, and in her beloved Paris meets with Svengali. With him she "stars" it through Europe, her voice creating a great sensation—a Bohemian and a vagabond, but happy in her own way—a " reversion to type."
Another drew the picture of Maud Muller as the wife of the Judge. Her lack of education and training in the conventions of his social environment lays her open to a criticism that constantly wounds her, the more so that the Judge himself grows impatient at her lapses, and, seeing her in different surroundings, wonders at his former infatuation.
Little by little his hurt pride grows so sensitive that the love dies out of his heart as suddenly as it came, and Maud goes back to her native village, maintained in the state becoming her new position, but with no communication with the Judge except through his lawyers.
One would think that the company were possessed by the belief that when an author disposes of the creatures of his imagination he is all-wise in the apportionment of their destinies, and that others could not improve upon them, had not one writer of the party which I am recalling drawn a radiant picture of the happiness of Owen Meredith's "Lucile" as the wife of Alfred |
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