She can't sing. She can't
sing."
New Year's calls were then the custom, and more than three hundred
men paid their respects to Mr. and Mrs. Botta on the New Year's Day I
spent with them. And everyone looked, as Theodore Hook said, as if he
were somebody in particular. At one of these "Saturday Evenings," a
stranger walked through her rooms, with hands crossed under his coat
and humming execrably as he wandered along. The gentle hostess went to
him with her winning smile and inquired, "Do you play also?" That
proves her capacity for sarcasm and criticism which she seldom
employed. She conversed remarkably well, but after all it was what she
did not say that proved her greatness and self-control.
Mrs. Botta had talent in various directions. She made portrait busts
in plaster that really were like the subjects, with occasionally an
inspired success, and that without any teaching. She showed genius in
this work. When a bust of her modelling was sent to Rome to be put
into marble, the foremost of Italian sculptors, not knowing the maker,
declared that nothing would be beyond the reach of the artist if _he_
would come to Rome and study technique for a year. Mrs. Botta asked me
to let her try to get my face. That was delightful.
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