I was not profoundly convinced that this was a safe risk for me to take.
But living here was becoming impossible. Our own people were out of the
question as purchasers of pictures. My still-lifes, from long exposure in
the window of a friendly merchant in Broad Street, were becoming the
camping-ground of the flies, and deteriorating rapidly. I was not strong in
landscape, and the only subjects which suggested themselves were military,
taken from my point of view politically, and not likely to be convertible
into cash by persons of other convictions.
I was leaning against my ceiling one gray afternoon--at least I suppose it
should be called ceiling, for it ran from the highest part of the chamber
on an angle to the floor, and was pierced by a dormer--and contemplating a
bunch of withered flowers which I had studied almost into dissolution, when
Mammy knocked.
I had laid my palette on the floor, and was standing with my hands in my
pockets. They fumbled, on one side with my bunch of keys, on the other with
a small roll of small bills, the dreadful fractional currency of that era,
whilst, in imagination, I projected my motive on the bare canvas, a twenty
by twenty-four.
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