"Ingres, did you say? I must try to
remember.... Puvis de Chavannes? What a curious name! but I do like
his picture. He has given that man Donald's shoulders," she said,
laying her hand on my arm and stopping me before a picture of a young
naked man sitting amid some grey rocks, with grey trees and a grey
sky. The young man in the picture had dark curly hair, and Mildred
said she would like to sit by him and put her hands through his hair.
"He has got big muscles, just like Donald. I like a man to be strong:
I hate a little man."
We wandered on talking of love and lovers, our conversation
occasionally interrupted, for however interested I was in Mildred, and
I was very much interested, the sight of a picture sometimes called
away my attention. When we came to the sculpture-room it seemed to me
that Mildred was more interested in sculpture than in painting, for
she stopped suddenly before Rodin's "L'age d'arain," and I began to
wonder if her mind were really accessible to the beauty of the
sculptor's art, or if her interest were entirely in the model that had
posed before Rodin. Sculpture is a more primitive art than painting;
sculpture and music are the two primitive arts, and they are therefore
open to the appreciation of the vulgar; at least, that is how I tried
to correlate Mildred with Rodin, and at the same moment the thought
rose up in my mind that one so interested in sex as Mildred was could
not be without interest in art.
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