Trilby | Page 5

lost themselves in a huge pair of male
slippers, which made her drag her feet as she walked.
She bore herself with easy, unembarrassed grace, like a person whose
nerves and muscles are well in tune, whose spirits are high, who has
lived much in the atmosphere of French studios, and feels at home in it.
This strange medley of garments was surmounted by a small bare head
with short, thick, wavy brown hair, and a very healthy young face,
which could scarcely be called quite beautiful at first sight, since the
eyes were too wide apart, the mouth too large, the chin too massive, the
complexion a mass of freckles. Besides, you can never tell how
beautiful (or how ugly) a face may be till you have tried to draw it.
But a small portion of her neck, down by the collarbone, which just
showed itself between the unbuttoned lapels of her military coat collar,
was of a delicate privet-like whiteness that is never to be found on any
French neck, and very few English ones. Also, she had a very fine brow,
broad and low, with thick level eyebrows much darker than her hair, a
broad, bony, high bridge to her short nose, and her full, broad cheeks
were beautifully modelled. She would have made a singularly
handsome boy.
As the creature looked round at the assembled company and flashed her
big white teeth at them in an all-embracing smile of uncommon width
and quite irresistible sweetness, simplicity, and friendly trust, one saw
at a glance that she was out of the common clever, simple, humorous,
honest, brave, and kind, and accustomed to be genially welcomed
wherever she went. Then suddenly closing the door behind her,
dropping her smile, and looking wistful and sweet, with her head on
one side and her arms akimbo, 'Ye're all English, now, aren't ye?' she
exclaimed. 'I heard the music, and thought I'd just come in for a bit, and
pass the time of day: you don't mind? Trilby, that's my name--- Trilby
O'Ferrall.'
She said this in English, with an accent half Scotch and certain French
intonations, and, in a voice so rich and deep and full as almost to
suggest an incipient tenore robusto; and one felt instinctively that it was

a real pity she wasn't a boy, she would have made such a jolly one.
'We're delighted, on the contrary,' said Little Billee, and advanced a
chair for her.
But she said, 'Oh, don't mind me; go on with the music,' and sat herself
down cross-legged on the model-throne near the piano.
As they still looked at her, curious and half embarrassed, she pulled a
paper parcel containing food out of one of the coat-pockets, and
exclaimed:
'I'll just take a bite, if you don't object; I'm a model, you know, and it's
just rung twelve--"the rest." I'm posing for Durien the sculptor, on the
next floor. I pose to him for the altogether.'
'The altogether?' asked Little Billee.
'Yes--l'ensemble, you know--head, hands, and feet---everything--
especially feet. That's my foot,' she said, kicking off her big slipper and
stretching out the limb. 'It's the handsomest foot in all Paris. There's
only one in all Paris to match it, and here it is,' and she laughed heartily
(like a merry peal of bells), and stuck out the other.
And in truth they were astonishingly beautiful feet, such as one only
sees in pictures and statues--a true inspiration of shape and colour, all
made up of delicate lengths and subtly-modulated curves and noble
straightnesses and happy little dimpled arrangements in innocent young
pink and white.
So that Little Billee, who had the quick, prehensile, aesthetic eye, and
knew by the grace of Heaven what the shapes and sizes and colours of
almost every bit of man, woman, or child should be (and so seldom are),
was quite bewildered to find that a real, bare, live human foot could be
such a charming object to look at, and felt that such a base or pedestal
lent quite an antique and Olympian dignity to a figure that seemed just
then rather grotesque in its mixed attire of military overcoat and female
petticoat, and nothing else!

Poor Trilby!
The shape of those lovely slender feet (that were neither large nor
small), facsimiled in dusty pale plaster of Paris, survives on the shelves
and walls of many a studio throughout the world, and many a sculptor
yet unborn has yet to marvel at their strange perfection, in studious
despair.
For when Dame Nature takes it into her head to do her very best, and
bestow her minutest attention on a mere detail, as happens now and
then--once in a blue moon, perhaps--she makes it uphill work for poor
human art to keep pace with her.
It is