It is the sort of cloak you would expect to find
there--a decorative cloak. An umbrella or a waterproof cape would be
fatal to the whole effect.
Now and again the illustrator of the artistic room will permit a
young girl to come and sit there. But she has to be a very carefully
selected girl. To begin with, she has got to look and dress as
though she had been born at least three hundred years ago. She has
got to have that sort of clothes, and she has got to have her hair
done just that way.
She has got to look sad; a cheerful girl in the artistic room would
jar one's artistic sense. One imagines the artist consulting with
the proud possessor of the house.
"You haven't got such a thing as a miserable daughter, have you?
Some fairly good-looking girl who has been crossed in love, or is
misunderstood. Because if so, you might dress her up in something
out of the local museum and send her along. A little thing like that
gives verisimilitude to a design."
She must not touch anything. All she may do is to read a book--not
really read it, that would suggest too much life and movement: she
sits with the book in her lap and gazes into the fire, if it happens
to be the dining-room: or out of the window if it happens to be a
morning-room, and the architect wishes to call attention to the
window-seat. Nothing of the male species, as far as I have been able
to ascertain, has ever entered these rooms.
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