Alida Craig (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Alida Craig was sitting on the top of a high ladder working at a big stained-glass cartoon that was tacked on one side of her studio wall. A large piece of tapestry and some bric- a-brac which had been taken down to make way for the cartoon were piled in an untidy heap on the floor, giving the room the air of a workshop. There were some very good pieces of tapestry on the walls, the fruit of long searches in the back streets of Paris in her student days, and the furniture was a motley collection of chairs and tables, many of which had been bought in the most dilapidated condition andthen polished and put in order as ready money and opportunity offered. There were book shelves filled, alas ! not with those sets of polite literature which no gentleman's library is without, but with worn half-calf and vellum volumes, picked up on the quays as she loitered along in the sunshine, and odd volumes of her favorite authors bought from time to time. Although it was late in the afternoon the big north window still let in a flood of light shining down on the sleek brown head of the owner of these multifarious and original belongings. As she sat on the top of the ladder in a long blue work-apron, with her heavy hair unfastened and hanging in a thick plait down her back, she might have been taken for a little girl, she looked so thin and young and child chapter{Section 4like. As she worked she kept singing over and over to herself the faint, pathetic air of Berlioz: "Once there was a King of Thule, True he was and brave." A model, an oval-faced, angelic- looking creature clad in thin Greek drapery, stood on the platform. In the intentness of keeping her pose her face assumed an expression of purity and sweetness that would have astonished those who saw her snappi...