The same year she gave Mrs. ex-Mayor Cinnamon a hammered brass
version of a C. D. Gibson drawing. The lady and gentleman looked as
if they had broken out with a combination of yellow fever and
smallpox, or suffered from enlarged pores or something. And the
plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall
paper. But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of
changing the paper some day. It stayed there until the fateful
evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was
just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the
wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and
bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur's skull. Mr. Chur said something
that may have been Damocles. But he did not propose, and Mrs.
Budlong was weeks wondering why Mrs. Cinnamon was so snippy to her.
The hammered brass era gave way to the opposite extreme of painted
velvet. They say it is a difficult art; and it may well be. Mrs.
Budlong's first landscape might as well have been painted on the side
of her Scotch collie.
Her most finished roses had something of the look of shaggy
tarantulas that had fallen into a paint pot and emerged in a towering
rage. It was in that velvetolene stratum that she painted for the
church a tasseled pulpit cloth that hung down a yard below the Bible.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25