Sep 25, 2008
John Collier In the Venusberg Tannhauser painting
“I had no idea.”
“Yes. Lucy never saw her, of course. It’s why she’s anxious about Julia.”
“Is she anxious about Julia?”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“How soon can you tell if they’re blind?”
“Not for weeks, I believe. I asked Sister Kemp. She said, ‘The very idea,’ and whisked the baby off as if I wanted to injure it, poor little brute. D’you know what Lucy calls Sister Kemp now?—Kempy.”
“It’s not possible.”
It was true. I went in to see her for five minutes and twice during that time she said “Kempy.” When we were alone for a minute I asked her why. “She asked me to,” said Lucy, “and she’s really very sweet.”
“Sweet?”
Sep 23, 2008
Frederic Edwin Church Cotopaxi painting
There was no other visible staff; just Mr. Hardcastle sitting among his folders and filing cabinets, telling me how he had felt when he lost his own father. Throughout all the vicissitudes of the flats this man had controlled them and lived for them; little companies had gone into liquidation; little, allied companies had been floated; the names of nephews and brothers-in-law had come and gone at the head of the notepaper; stocks had been written down and up, new shares had been issued, bonuses and dividends declared, mortgages transferred and foreclosed, little blocks of figures moved from one balance sheet to another, all in this single room. For the last ten years a few thousand pounds capital had been borrowed and lent backwards and forwards from one account to another and, somehow, working sixteen hours a day, doing his own typing and accountancy, Mr. Hardcastle
Sep 19, 2008
Henri Matisse Goldfish painting
Nor was Mr. Brough’s adherence long maintained. The ship in which they were travelling was a cruising liner taking passengers on a round voyage. Mr. Brough had not been on board a week and had scarcely accustomed himself to the motion of the ship before he was engaged to be married; he was still engaged, although to a different lady, when they reached Manáos and refused all inducements to proceed farther, borrowing his return
Sep 17, 2008
Jean Beraud Pont des arts painting
“Did you say you came by train?” said the Duke.
“By the twelve fifty-five.”
“But you said you were coming by motor.”
“No, really, I can’t have said that. For one thing I haven’t got a motor.”
“But if you hadn’t said that, I should have sent Byng to meet you. Byng didn’t meet you, did he?”
“No,” I said, “he did not.”
“Well, there you see.”
Lady Emily put down the core of her apple and said very suddenly:
“Your father used to live over at Oakshott. I knew him quite well. Shocking bad on a horse.”
Sep 15, 2008
Salvador Dali clock melting clocks painting
"Obviously," several of his colleagues agreed, and even his mentor nodded with a slight cock of the head, as if to say that while details of the young man's gloss were not unexceptionable, as a rough-and-ready formulation it would do.
"But wecan't agree whetherA orB is correct," he concluded, "and so we're collecting expert opinions, weighting them appropriately, and programming WESCAC to arbitrate the whole question." He winked and chuckled. "You may be interested to know that your colleague Dr. Bray has already obliged us with his judgment -- though you understand I'm not at liberty to confide it, or what his weighting is on our little scale."
They waited for me to speak. "Gentlemen," I said, "your problem is most
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema promise of spring painting
Affirmative," said the P.-G., and at her direction the aides began issuing articles of cold-weather clothing, warm though ill-fitting, to the demonstrators.
"Three-A Sub One!" Grandfather barked. At once the receptionist offered to deputize the bearded student leader as an assistant aide, or field supervisor of P.P.F. disbursements, at a high salary. He hesitated, considered the jeers of his out-of-classmates, but finally accepted the post, protesting to his fellows that one had to see the undergraduate revolution in its larger perspective, if one was not to be after all an ivory-towernaïf. "Even Sakhyan --" he started to explain.
"Three-A Sub Two!" the ex-Chancellor shouted triumphantly. His receptionist whispered something into the new aide's ear, whereupon he exchanged his soiled-sheepskin jacket for a heavy olive topcoat with epaulets, bestowing the fleece upon Ira Hector. The students booed.
"Losers weepers!" Ira cackled."Sauve qui peut! Possession is nine points of the law!"
"Keep your advice, boy," Grandfather told me proudly. "I'll get to Commencement Gate on my own two feet! Beholden to none!"
Sep 10, 2008
Lancelot and Guinevere
I would have proceeded then to mount her, in defiance of my ownprogramme, but that some of my senses had yet to make her complete acquaintance; and having ejaculated I was able to put by lust and do her bidding with more clinical detachment. Once I'd come to know her from head to foot with my elbows, knees, ears, hams, testicles, and shoulderblades, I sniffed and tasted her, in that order, with similar thoroughness. These final researches were less novel to me, inasmuch as the goats make liberal use of nose and tongue, both to greet old acquaintances and make new ones, and to investigate their general environs. But of course they are without toes and recessed navels, for example, and use neither soap nor artificial scents; obviously too the difference between their diet and a lady human co-ed's (more than the difference in species) made my degustation of Anastasia no mere repetition of my former converse with Hedda O.T.S.T. or Redfearn's Tom. I
Sep 7, 2008
Caravaggio paintings
Greene cocked his head, much moved. "I don't know. I swear to Pete. . . That durn window by the funhouse that I told you-all about -- you know what I decided a while back, when I was in jail here?" He looked from one to the other of us. "Come to me it weren't any window at all, but a gosh-durn mirror!"
Max pretended astonishment.
"It wasme talking dirty to Sally Ann!" Greene said bitterly. "I chunked that rock at my own self, that I thought was the Peeping Tom!"
Leonid feigned horror. "Impossity, Peter Greene!"
"Sure it is!" Greene laughed and sprang up with more vigor than he'd displayed since the rape. "Couldn't nobody see their own reflection so far off, all that distortion!"
"Night-time too," I reminded him -- relieved, but not unappalled, that he'd taken
Sep 4, 2008
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema In the Tepidarium painting
I could not help smiling. "Maybe the Goat-Boy will get to Chancellor Rexford, too," I suggested. Reginald Hector declared with a sniff that he'd heard disturbing rumors to just that effect, adding that back in the days of C.R. II such a dangerous subversive would have been shot, at least underhis command. Nowadays it was coddle, coddle -- and look at the crime-rate, and the drop-out rate, and the illegitimate birthrate, and the varsity situation!
"The Goat-Boy won't meddle any more," one of the aides said from the hallway, and reported what he'd just heard from the crowd outside: that I had left the impostor EATen in WESCAC's Belly