MEN I HAVE PAINTED
and forks in reserve. There was no servant in attendance. Leighton helped himself and me with great deftness and ease, and passed the first dish, piping hot, across the table, on a hot plate. When the first course was finished we placed the used plates and forks on the reserve table and took fresh plates from it. Now there was one thing about these breakfasts that I shall not forget—the grilled bacon. It surpassed any bacon I have ever seen or tasted, and I can compare it—may the roses forgive me!—only to the pink petals of some rather large and strange rose that had fallen to pieces in the dish. I do not say that it tasted like rose leaves, or smelled either like pot-pourri or attar of roses: and of this I am very glad, because my appetite demanded something less delicately fragrant, and more substantial and nourishing; but it was bacon cured à point, with the right flavour of smoking peat, and cooked lightly and lovingly by some experienced chef de cuisine. The dinners, you ask? Well, they were excellent; but I have had others, the most remarkable of which does not enter here, for I did not paint the host: he was by far too rich to think of having his portrait done.
Those breakfasts were the undoing of the portrait, for from the time I sat down to work I could think of nothing but the coffee and bacon, and I was so constantly on the qui vive for the first word of announcement, or the first faint odour of bacon, which, of course, in that well-regulated establishment, never was allowed to go anywhere but up the chimney, that my work suffered from the persistent distraction, and failed miserably.
Only one incident occurred that is worthy to be related. One morning Val Prinsep—who lived next door to Leighton, and who, as well as being a painter, was the husband of
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