A milkmaid Cosie Lennox decided. In those far-off years he had given St. Philip Neri his seven lamps in memory of Lord Alexander Gordon Lennox, compiler of the Daily Prayer Book, and of Lady Boo, a Townley; he had the air of a young Roman patrician who shared all the pastimes of Catullus ; stage-struck but not yet a mummer; young enough to shake off the obsession of painted faces : ‘I am never attracted by anyone I have not seen made up; almost anyone made up can attract me; no attraction responded to outlasts six weeks’ he once confided to me. That conversation has weighed on my memory like a dream from which unlikely, unseemly, isolated episodes emerge. Can it all have happened, can he have told me about those Jews, the widower, the mother? (How little we had to learn from Proust.) He was not yet married to Miss Marie Tempest, nor contemplating such an alliance; he was indeed already, had we but known, an animated signpost that leads to the tragic desert.

A milkmaid, Mabel, our Mélisande: it was inconceivable that she should ever have suggested a milkmaid, unless one imagined Madame de Lamballe or Madame de Polignac at the Petit Trianon. Not that hers was a Beardsley type, either naturally or willingly, like Baroness Olga de Meyer, for instance; she had nothing of the girl with Messalina; perhaps at her most triumphant she recalled or inspired the beautiful Venus of Under the hill. Not long before her blessed release from this world, when she suffered from delusions, writing cheques, giving them away or thinking she did so, to dear compassionate friends, her face appeared to me like a gilt mask, carved, lacquered, lovable, heart-breaking.