A brilliant Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian's Daughter, lifting her gold salver laden with grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and rich brocade, and a young Mrs.Van Alstyne, who showed the frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a curtained archway.

Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar of Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians, lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.
Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty Farish's running commentary--"Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!" or: "That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple"-- did not break the spell of the illusion.

Indeed, so skilfully had the personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.
Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality--the unanimous "Oh!" of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds's "Mrs.Lloyd" but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart.

She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself.

It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds's canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.