It was perhaps a day hardly less interesting for Myrtilla than for the
young people themselves when she had first met Henry and Esther
Mesurier. Before, in the dull bourgeois society into which Williamson
had transplanted her from London, she had found none with whom she dared
be her natural Myrtilla. There she was expected to be Williamson to the
bone. Henry and Esther, however, were only too grateful for Myrtilla,
through whom was to come to them the revelation of some minor graces of
life for which they had the instincts, but on which they had lacked
instruction; and who, still more important, at least for Henry, was to
be their first fragile link with certain strenuous new northern writers,
translations of whom in every tongue had just then descended, Gothlike,
upon Europe, to the great energising of its various literatures. She it
was too who first handed them the fretted golden key to the enchanted
garden of the Pre-Raphaelites, and the striking head of the young Dante
in sepia, which had hung in a sort of shrine-recess in Henry's study,
had been copied for him from Rossetti's sketch by Myrtilla's own hand.
Pages:
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68