Show A NEW LONDON FAD l Madame Blavatsky and Cooperative Cooper-ative Housekeeping THE r MODERN ATHLETIC WOMAN I The Interest Taken by Stanley In His Wifes First Book The Melancholy English Queen Loxnox Oct 20 180Special correspondence I cor-respondence of Tax HEUALDJ J new fad will enslave London absolutely but it must have time Marie Bashkirtseffs Journal Jour-nal has run its wild course in New York and is being forgotten In London Miss Vlalilda Blind its translator has beearead ing select ravings from it all summer as an enlivenment at afternoons and at homes and the interest at first as weak as the tea has now steeped sufficiently togo to-go well with the gunpowder brand of tho national beverage Miss Blind herself is moro interesting than her readings which rouse such belated enthusiasm The mother of THE STRANGE TODNG RUSSIAN gave her a copy of the journal at Nice in the Autumn of 1887 and she began at once to exploit her find in print thus discovering discover-ing i the fftmk and fascinating Marie She has written lives of George Eliot and Mme Roland and that oracle the London Times has praised her poems she considers The Ascent of Man her crowning effort and her admirers quote Mr Alfred Russell Wallace as comparing that ambitious epic of Darwinism with the glorious poetry of Tennysons In Memoriam Miss Blind is a pretty woman Her home is in a pleasant spot far above the smoke of London almost at the top of Primrose Hill Ivy clusters about her study windows birds twitter and trees wave Here she will tell you stories of vlazzini in whose little room at Brompton she used to sit as a child listening to his talk open mouthed She is one of THE MODERN ATHLETIC WOMEN who shoulder knapsacks and explore the wildest nooks of Europe untroubled by trains or time tables She was eighteen when she went through the Bernese Ober land on foot and alone You would hardly suspect hdr of these unconventional rambles ram-bles when in pale green silk an aesthetic and decorous figure she decorously recites to an audience of decorous matrons Marie Mare Bashkirtseffs very indecorous utterances I is oad by the way that the statement should b going the rounds of the press that the French government has just bought > Marie Bashkirtseffs picture The Meeting In point of fact that group of street urchins has hung for some time in avery a-very good position in the galleries of the Luxembourg where it is always surrounded rounded by emulous girl copyists The Luxembourg has also a second picture by Marie Bashkirtseff a sketch of her mother Mme Blavatsky and Cooperative housekeeping House-keeping I was out at St Johns Wood the other day that pretty and quiet suburb of London Lon-don where in ihe novels of the day the I beautiful and wicked sirens who alienate I weak husbands affections commonly live in bijou residences St Johns Wood has in good truth one strange household at present that in which Mme Blavatsky grown stout slouchy and elderly sits down at meat with chipper and chirpy Mrs Jooper Oakley the Girton girl who goes in theosophy aud millinery The establishment ishment of these strangely mated spirits is conducted on the cooperative plan Not that the high priestess has the physical energy or the fashionable milliner the time for much soiling hands with dishwash ink but it has seemed good t the ladies of the TheosophicaT of London to experiment ex-periment with a sort of Brooke Farm where theosaphical sweetness and light shall pervade the atmosphere Some pro teges of Mrs CooperOakley poor girls one or two of them broken down in London shopswoman the kitchen Mrs Annie Besant comes out to tea and Mme Blavat sky smiles She has reason for since leaving New York she has reposed in clover fields Mrs Cooper Oakley has supplied her with a good deal of money and seems likely continue manifesting her faith in the stm agreeable manner The St Johns Wood establishment is a modest brick house buried in trees |