Sometimes you just have to let the metaphor go

[alias_sqbr]

From the regency romance I'm reading ("Almost a Gentleman" by Pam Rosenthal):

It's as though someone had made pictures of those moments&mdash not paintings, more like horribly precise engravings, drained of color, etched by a flash of light&mdash and affixed them eternally in my thoughts. Thank heaven there's no machine that can create such pictures&mdash only my accursed guilty memory.

eg "It's like black and white photos in my head. Except cameras haven't been invented yet."

And engravings don't naturally have colour anyway.

I feel a sense of unjustified pride that thanks to hlbr's brilliant beta-ing my own regency dialogue doesn't have so many anachronistic contractions. (Or American spelling for that matter)