― Mrs Bloom, my wife the prima donna , Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ’96 . Very like her then.
Beside the young man he looked also at the photo of the lady now his legal wife who, he intimated, was the accomplished daughter of Major Brian Tweedy and displayed at an early age remarkable proficiency as a singer having even made her bow to the public when her years numbered barely sweet sixteen. As for the face, it was a speaking likeness in expression but it did not do justice to her figure, which came in for a lot of notice usually and which did not come out to the best advantage in that getup. She could without difficulty, he said, have posed for the ensemble, not to dwell on certain opulent curves of the … He dwelt, being a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female form in general developmentally because, as it so happened, no later than that afternoon, he had seen those Grecian statues, perfectly developed as works of art, in the National Museum. Marble could give the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry. All the rest, yes, Puritanism. It does though, St. Joseph’s sovereign … whereas no photo could, because it simply wasn’t art, in a word.
The spirit moving him, he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar’s good example and leave the likeness