Always marry an April girl

Effie Ruskin, 1853, John Everett Millais

Painted in Glenfinlas for John Ruskin, this small scale and jewel-like image of Effie intent on her stitching, very intimate in its close focus, reflects both Millais's careful and precise style in the early 1850s and his increasingly and intense attention to Mrs Ruskin. During this trip to Scotland, ostensibly to paint the portrait of her husband, Effie became Millais's favourite subject. Due to Ruskin's frequent unavailability and the vagaries of the weather, he turned to sketching her on rocks and painting her indoors. She was a willing and ideal subject, often consumed by the inordinately still activity of stitching. She was also his pupil, taking lessons from him and making a pencil copy of this very picture. In the end, Millais kept the original.

Oh to be odd

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.

The Duck, Ogden Nash

Silly girl, silver girl

To A Small Boy Standing On My Shoes While I Am Wearing Them

The Little Disturbances of Man - III

On the mystical side of this solitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with. It is this that is frightening & exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out.

Virginia Woolf