Gray youth by Oliver Onions

A GIRL of seventeen, with a knitted tam-o’-shanter cap and a thick cable of red-bronze hair hanging down her back, walked along a gallery of the Louvre, looking for her aunt. The eyes that turned whenever she heard a footfall or, passing a statue or case, saw a fresh vista before her, were of a light brown, with just such a hint of gold in their irises as you see when some opals are turned and catch a different light; and they were confused and overfilled with the treasures on which they had rested. She was an art-student, and must return to London on the morrow in order to resume her studies at the McGrath.
It was her first visit to Paris, and she had spent the whole of her three weeks at the Cluny and the Luxembourg, at the Louvre and Versailles. Now, drenched and sated with beauty, she still could not bear to leave it all. A few minutes before, passing through the Salon Carré, where an elderly lady had been copying the Entombment, she had wished that she too might be old and white-haired if only age might so enlarge her capacity for loveliness, that even youth would be well lost for it.[12] Already she loved the highest when she saw it, and, being an artist, she needs must attempt it too.