Ebook Adrift

The room was well furnished, and littered with works of art in various stages of progress. An Ariadne, lumpy and dropsical-looking, reclined on the mantel-shelf, incompletely evolved from the sur rounding clay. A heap of bright silks lay on a table beside a piece of ruby plush, one incipient bud thereon alone revealing that, fortune favoring, its lustrous surface would some time be enriched by a spray of wild. Roses. On an easel in the corner was a half-finished crayon head of Dante; the unskilful draughtsman having been unable to reproduce the well-known melancholy droop of mouth and eyelids, the great Florentine's usual lugubrious expression was replaced by a sort of smirk which could not fail to make the judicious grieve. Besides these articles and the implements required in their execution, books, letters, pamphlets, and newspapers were strewn about in a careless confusion from which one might infer the presiding genius of the apart ment to be a woman of versatile tastes and manifold intellectual resources, as well as a very untidy house keeper.