by The_Technician
It reads a little hasty, but the plot itself is charmingly bittersweet. I'm now falling down a rabbit hole on how toxic paint impacted late Victorian aesthetics. :p
There is more to this story than meets the eye. First there is the very real likely hood that the green paint was tinted with one of the various shades of arsenic green
Second there is the analogy to Poe's Mask of the Red Death.
Hope you win!