Miss Farish’s confidences were cut short by the parting of the curtain on the first TABLEAU— a group of nymphs dancing across flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision. To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination. Selden’s mind was of this order: he could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry’s TABLEAUX wanted none of the qualities which go to the prod
