The next time Lawrence spent the evening with us I sang the song for
him. While I did so, he stood by the piano in a state of profound
abstraction, from which he recovered himself, as if coming back from
very far away, and with an expression of acute pain on his countenance,
he thanked me repeatedly for what he called the great favor I had done
him.
At the end of my next sitting, when my mother and myself had risen to
take leave of him, he said, "No, don't go yet,--stay a moment,--I want
to show you something--if I can;" and he moved restlessly about, taking
up and putting down his chalks and pencils, and standing, and sitting
down again, as if unable to make up his mind to do what he wished. At
length he went abruptly to an easel, and, removing from it a canvas with
a few slight sketches on it, he discovered behind it the profile
portrait of a lady in a white dress folded simply across her bosom, and
showing her beautiful neck and shoulders. Her head was dressed with a
sort of sibylline turban, and she supported it upon a most lovely hand
and arm, her elbow resting on a large book, toward which she bent, and
on the pages of which her eyes were fixed, the exquisite eyelid and
lashes hiding the eyes.
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