Page 24 of The Muse of Maiden Lane

“I mean that there are no limits. No boundaries. There are only feelings—the artist’s own and those he evokes in the viewer. All the rest is…” He gestured vaguely again before trailing off with a grimace.

So much for guarding his tongue.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I get rather exercised on the subject.”

“You needn’t apologize for being passionate about something.”

“For being ineloquent, then.”

“You’re not ineloquent.” She motioned to a nearby chair. “May I?”

“Please,” he said.

She sank down on the tufted seat, her full skirts pooling about her feet in a spill of sensible blue wool.

Teddy appreciated her sitting down. Many people didn’t in his presence, preferring to loom over him in his chair. He despised having to crane his neck to look up at them. He’d much rather look a person in the eyes.

Had Miss Hobhouse intuited that? He suspected she had.

“Mr. Whistler’s painting did make me feel something,” she said, flicking a brief, rueful glance upward to her black-crepe-covered hair. “Obviously.”

Teddy had noted the similarity of her hair color to that of the woman in Whistler’s piece on the night of the opening ball, but he hadn’t comprehended the reason behind that similarity. Not until this moment.

The realization struck him like a thunderbolt. “Is that why you colored your hair? Because of Whistler’s painting?”

The guilty flash of embarrassment in Miss Hobhouse’s eyes was as good as an admission.

“I don’t know why he called it The Woman in White,” she said, rather than answering him. “It didn’t resemble any of the female characters in Mr. Collins’s novel.”

Wilkie Collins’s wildly popular and sensational novel, The Woman in White, had been released but a few years prior, to enormous success. It was a common misconception that Whistler’s painting was meant as an illustration from the story. Both the public and art critics had made the error, to Whistler’s detriment.

“Whistler didn’t name his painting The Woman in White,” Teddy said. “You can blame that on the gallery owner. Apparently, he thought to capitalize on the success of Mr. Collins’s novel.”

“That was presumptuous of him.”

“Unwise as well. All it’s done is bring unwarranted criticism on the piece. He’d have done better to keep its original name—The White Girl—as Whistler intended.”

Her brows notched in a thoughtful frown. “Still…I suppose the title is accurate. The painting is of a woman in white. The most arresting thing about her was her hair.”

“And the light,” Teddy said. “And the color.”

“The absence of color, more like. There was so much white in it.”

It was a valid observation on its surface. Whistler’s painting depicted a fair-skinned lady in a white cambric dress. His mistress, in fact: the auburn-haired beauty Joanna Hiffernan. She stood on a white rug against a pale, curtained background, gazing out at the viewer with an enigmatic stare.

“I don’t understand what it was all supposed to mean,” Miss Hobhouse said.

“Why should it mean anything?”

“Why? Because art is meant to mean something.” She gave him a doubtful look. “Isn’t it?”

“Mean something how?” he asked. “Morally? Philosophically?”

“Yes, I suppose. To uplift or…or to educate.”

“I reject that notion,” he said emphatically.

A glimmer of amusement sparked in her eyes. “Naturally, you do.”