'Then came the farmhouse--old, red-brick, red-tiled, casemented--everything that the aesthetic soul desires--the farmer and his wife looking out for us, and a pleasant homely meal ready in the parlour, with its last-century woodwork.
'Forbes was greatly in his element at lunch. I never knew him more racy; he gave us biographies, mostly imaginary, illustrated by sketches, made in the intervals of eating, of the sitters whose portraits he has condescended to take this year. They range from a bishop and a royalty down to a little girl picked up in the London streets, and his presentation of the characteristic attitudes of each--those attitudes which, according to him, betray the "inner soul" of the bishop or the foundling--was admirable. Then he fell upon the Academy--that respected body of which I suppose he will soon be the President--and tore it limb from limb. With what face I shall ever sit at the same table with him at the Academy dinners of the future--supposing fortune ever exalts me again as she did this year to that august meal--I hardly know. Millais's faces, Pettie's knights, or Calderon's beauties--all fared the same. You could not say it was ill-natured; it was simply the bare truth of things put in the whimsical manner which is natural to Forbes.
'Miss Bretherton listened to and laughed at it all, finding her way through the crowd of unfamiliar names and allusions with a woman's cleverness, looking adorable all the time in a cloak of some brown velvet stuff, and a large hat also of brown velvet. She has a beautiful hand, fine and delicate, not specially small, but full of character; it was pleasant to watch it playing with her orange, or smoothing back every now and then the rebellious locks which will stray, do what she will, beyond the boundaries assigned to them. Presently Wallace was ill-advised enough to ask her which pictures she had liked best at the Private View; she replied by picking out a ballroom scene of Forth's and an unutterable mawkish thing of Halford's--a troubadour in a pink dressing-gown, gracefully intertwined with violet scarves, singing to a party of robust young women in a "light which never was on sea or land." "You could count all the figures in the first," she said, "it was so lifelike, so real;" and then Halford was romantic, the picture was pretty, and she liked it. I looked at Forbes with some amusement; it was gratifying, remembering the rodomontade with which Wallace and had been crushed on the night of the _White Lady_, to see him wince under Miss Bretherton's liking of the worst art in England! Is the critical spirit worth something, or is it superfluous in theatrical matters and only indispensable in matters of painting! I think he caught the challenge in my eye, for he evidently felt himself in some little difficulty.