Franny Moyle Read Online Free PDF Page B

supplied. Apart from full-time tuition, the school offered part-time and evening classes, and it’s likely that Constance, with all her other activities, opted for the latter. One convention of the school was the expectation that students should join the St John’s Wood Sketch Club and enter their work for regular viewings where invited practitioners and celebrities came to judge the pupils’ work.
    In August 1882, while Oscar was introducing residents of the state of New York to the joys of the artistic movement in England, Constance was planning her contributions for the sketch club exhibition. She was on holiday at Delgaty Castle in Aberdeenshire. The imposing sixteenth-century castle, with its white-harled five-storeytower, had come into the ownership of the local Ainslie family, who were resident there that summer in their latest incarnation as Mr and Mrs Grant-Duff-Ainslie. Amid the magnificent setting of the imposing castle and its sumptuous grounds, the house party comprised a Mr Huxley, a Miss Michelle, Mrs Ainslie’s cousin Mr Morgan and his family, a Colonel Forbes and the main Ainslie clan, which included sixteen-year-old Douglas.
    On arrival Constance realized that Delgaty provided plenty of opportunity for sketching and immediately dispatched instructions to Otho in Lancaster Gate to send her ‘my spectacles which are lying somewhere in my room in a case … Next is a small sketch book, thickish paper about 10 inches by 6 which I shall be awfully obliged if you can get to me … Also a medium sized, rather large camel’s hair brush, a good one. I am very anxious to try and take some sketches here, though I expect not to succeed.’ 16
    Constance quickly discovered that any ambition to make a series of sketches for the St John’s Sketch Club would be hard to realize. She was having far too much fun. There were billiards, tennis and chess tournaments, punctuated by picnics and outings. She was even being taught how to shoot. And of course, there were those mystical activities in the evenings that she so adored. She was mesmerized one night by one member of the group and ‘upset Mrs Ainslie dreadfully. She thought I was awfully ill!’ In fact, Constance revealed that she had ‘never enjoyed myself so much anywhere’ as during that wonderful summer in Scotland.
    But something else happened during that holiday. The happy radiance that Constance exuded proved irresistible to the male members of the party and quickly ignited the jealousies of women in the group. If the growing number of admirers to date gives a picture of Constance as clearly attractive, this account shows that she was something far more than commonly attractive. She was, frankly, sexy and unconventionally precocious. In short, whether she was conscious of it or not, she was a magnet and a flirt.
    At first it was Mr Huxley who fell under Constance’s spell, much to the annoyance of Miss Michelle, who became
    jealous of me because for 3 days before I came, Mr Huxley devoted himself to her. I think she is about 45, of Italian descent, the daughter of a diplomat, and consequently has been all over Europe and is very amusing, but she’s terribly superstitious and too fond of chat. She never knows when to stop and riles everyone. I have offended her mortally and she will not forgive me, which is rather a nuisance. 17
    But it was not just Mr Huxley who found Constance Lloyd so compelling. Once Huxley had left the party, the teenage Douglas Ainslie confided that he too was utterly smitten with Constance, despite the fact she was a good eight years his senior. ‘Douglas says that he was so jealous of Mr Huxley that he didn’t know what to do,’ Constance told Otho, ‘and used to go and bemoan himself to Miss Michelle, and ask her what he should do to make himself agreeable.’ 18
    Constance’s and Douglas’s flirtations were quickly noticed by the wider group, and a series