What made things worse for me was her adoption of European clothes since
coming to this place: I believe that, in her adroit way, she herself
made some of her dresses, for one day I saw in her apartments a number
of coloured fashion-plates, with a confusion like dress-making; or she
may have been only modifying finished things from the shops, for her
Western dressing is not quite like what I remember of the modern female
style, but is really, I should say, quite her own, rather resembling the
Greek, or the eighteenth century. At any rate, the airs and graces are
as natural to her as feathers to parrots; and she has changes like the
moon; never twice the same, and always transcending her last phase and
revelation: for I could not have conceived of anyone in whom _taste_ was
a faculty so separate as in her, so positive and salient, like smelling
or sight--more like _smelling_: for it is the faculty, half Reason, half
Imagination, by which she fore-scents precisely what will suit
exquisitely with what; so that every time I saw her, I received the
impression of a perfectly novel, completely bewitching, work of Art: the
special quality of works of Art being to produce the momentary
conviction that anything else whatever could not possibly be so good.
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