It was Jennie's first approach to beauty on this scale of immensity and variety. It was her first draught of Art. Her childhood's poring over _Ancient Rome Restored_ had given her a feeling for line and economy, but she had never dreamed that color, substance, and texture could be used with this daring, profuse creativeness. Having no ability to seize details, she drifted helplessly up and down aisles of splendor and gleam. Here there were gold and silver, here was tapestry, here crystal, here enamel. The pictures were endless, endless. She could no more deal with them than with a sunset. Life came to the Scarborough tradition in her as it does to a frozen limb, with distress and yet with an element of ecstasy. A soul that had passed to a higher plane of existence, whom there was no one to welcome and guide, might have ventured timidly into the celestial land as Jennie among these lovely things outside her comprehension.
She came to herself, as it were, on hearing a man's voice say, in a kind of tone and idiom with which she was familiar:
"Have you looked at this Cellini now? That's the only authentic bit of Cellini in the United States. There's six or seven other pieces in different museums that people says is Cellini, but there's always a hitch in the proof."
Turning, she saw a stocky man in custodian's uniform who was addressing a group of Italians, two bareheaded women, three children between ten and fifteen, and a man. All were interested. All studied the gold shell with its dragon-shaped handle in purplish enamel. They commented, criticized, appraised, even the children pointing out excellencies to one another. When they had drifted away, Jennie turned to the kindly Irishman, who, by dint of living with beauty, had grasped its spirit, and put a hesitating question. She asked him to repeat the name of the gold-smith, pronouncing it after him till she registered it on her mind as she had that of Lady Hamilton.
"Sure, there was an artist for you," the custodian went on. "The breed is dead and gone. Hot-timpered fellow, though. Had more mistresses and killed more men than you could count. Should read about him in a book he wrote himself." He looked at Jennie from the corner of an eye, accustomed to "size up" an individual here and there among the thousands who floated daily through his little domain, apparently finding in her something that merited further favors. "Are you wise to this Memling?" he asked, leading the way to a corner of the wall where hung a small portrait. "There's only two other men in the wor-rld that could have painted that head, and that's Holbein and Rembrandt. Memling himself never did it but just that wance."