Lady of the Cards - Elegant Playing Card Set for Women | Perfect for Poker Nights, Girls' Night In & Card Game Lovers

"Not a word was said for almost an hour. He stroked her cheek with loving affection and gratitude, without their eyes ever leaving each other's. His hand came close to her lips. She wanted to let him know that she did understand the profoundness of existence with its deepest, innermost events. The words he would have wanted to say." "Lady of the Cards: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel," a moving tribute to the friendship and artistic collaboration between Rosita Fanto and the late Richard Ellmann, records those moments of closeness, of unarticulated thoughts, of profound understanding between the artist and the scholar until his untimely death from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Together they created the exquisite "Oscar Wilde Playing Cards." Their friendship, relatively brief in time yet intense, became increasingly more necessary to both as Professor Ellmann shared with her his fears about his deteriorating health, depended on the hope she tried to instill in him, and was supported by the loving solicitude she bestowed on him. The story "Rosita del Montecard" tells Richard Ellmann of a baby onca, the Brazilian jaguar, king of the jungle, screaming yet reduced to utter helplessness as it floats on the pad of a giant water lily down the piranha-infested Amazon, symbolizes their helplessness in the face of implacable circumstance: "There is nothing you, or anyone, can do. Only watch." And we can only watch as an artist/memoirist and an eminent biographer bravely accommodate themselves to his journey down that river.