I guess she'd live through it," said the mother with a laugh. She added, "I don't know as I know just what you mean by the Synthesis of Art Studies."
"It's a society that the art-students have formed. They have their own building, and casts, and models; the principal artists have classes among them. You submit a sketch, and if you get in you work away till you drop, if you're in earnest, or till you're bored, if you're amusing yourself."
"And should you think," said the mother gesturing toward him with the sketches in her hand, "that she could get in?"
"I think she could," said Ludlow, and he acted upon a sudden impulse. He took a card from his pocketbook, and gave it to the mother. "If you'll look me up when you come to New York, or let me know, I may be of use to you, and I shall be very glad to put you in the way of getting at the Synthesis."
"Thanks," the mother drawled with her eyes on the card. She probably had no clear sense of the favor done her. She lifted her eyes and smiled on Ludlow with another kind of intelligence. "You're visiting at Mrs. Burton's."
"Yes," said Ludlow, remembering after a moment of surprise how pervasive the fact of a stranger's presence in a village is. "Mr. Burton can tell you who I am," he added in some impatience with her renewed scrutiny of his card.
"Oh, it's all right," she said, and she put it in her pocket, and then she began to drift away a little. "Well, I'm sure I'm much obliged to you." She hesitated a moment, and then she said, "Well, good afternoon."
"Good-by," said Ludlow, and he lifted his hat and stood bowing her out of the Fine Arts Department, while she kept her eyes on him to the last with admiration and approval.
"Well, I declare, Cornelia," she burst out to her daughter, whom she found glowering at the agricultural implements, "that is about the nicest fellow! Do you know what he's done?" She stopped and began a search for her pocket, which ended successfully. "He's given me his name, and told me just what you're to do. And when you get to New York, if you ever do, you can go right straight to him."
She handed Ludlow's card to the girl, who instantly tore it to pieces without looking at it. "I'll never go to him—horrid, mean, cross old thing! And you go and talk about me to a perfect stranger as if I were a baby. And now he'll go and laugh at you with the Burtons, and they'll say it's just like you to say everything that comes into your head, that way, and think everybody's as nice as they seem. But he isn't nice! He's horrid, and conceited, and—and—hateful. And I shall never study art anywhere. And I'd die before I asked him to help me. He was just making fun of you all the time, and anybody but you would see it, mother! Comparing me to a hired girl!"
"No, I don't think he did that, Cornelia," said the mother with some misgiving. "I presume he may have been a little touched up by your pictures, and wanted to put me down about them——"
"Oh, mother, mother, mother!" The girl broke into tears over the agricultural implements. "They were the dust under his feet."
"Why, Cornelia, how you talk!"
"I wish you wouldn't talk, mother! I've asked you a thousand times, if I've asked you once, not to talk about me with anybody, and here you go and tell everything that you can think of to a person that you never saw before."
"What did I tell him about you?" asked her mother, with the uncertainty of ladies who say a great deal.
"You told him how old I was almost to a day!"
"Oh, well, that wasn't anything! I saw he'd got to know if he was to give any opinion about your going on that was worth having."
"It'll be all over town, to-morrow. Well, never mind! It's the last time you'll ever have a chance to do it. I'll never, never, never touch a pencil to draw with again! Never! You've done it now, mother! I don't care! I'll help you with your work, all you want, but don't ever ask me to draw a single thing after this. I guess he wouldn't have much to say about the style of a bonnet, or set of a dress, if it was wrong!"
The girl swept out of the building with tragedy-queen strides that refused to adjust themselves to the lazy, lounging pace of her mother, and carried her homeward so swiftly that she had time to bang the front gate and the front door, and her own room door and lock it, and be crying on the bed with her face in the pillow, long before her mother reached the house. The mother wore a face of unruffled serenity, and as there was no one near to see, she relaxed her vigilance, and smiled with luxurious indifference to the teeth she had lost.
V.
Ludlow found his friend Burton smoking on his porch when he came back from the fair, and watching with half-shut eyes the dust that overhung the street. Some of the farmers were already beginning to drive home, and their wheels sent up the pulverous clouds which the western sun just tinged with red; Burton got the color under the lower boughs of the maple grove of his deep door-yard.
"Well," he called out, in a voice expressive of the temperament which kept him content with his modest fortune and his village circumstance, when he might have made so much more and spent so much more in the world outside, "did you get your picture?"
Ludlow was only half-way up the walk from the street when the question met him, and he waited to reach the piazza steps before he answered.
"Oh, yes, I think I've got it." By this time Mrs. Burton had appeared at the hall door-way, and stood as if to let him decide whether he would come into the house, or join her husband outside. He turned aside to take a chair near Burton's, tilted against the wall, but he addressed himself to her.
"Mrs. Burton, who is rather a long-strung, easy-going, good-looking, middle-aged lady, with a daughter about fifteen years old, extremely pretty and rather peppery, who draws?"
Mrs. Burton at once came out, and sat sidewise in the hammock, facing the two men.
"How were they dressed?"
Ludlow told as well as he could; he reserved his fancy of the girl's being like a hollyhock.
"Was the daughter pretty?"
"Very pretty."
"Dark?"
"Yes, 'all that's best of dark and bright.'"
"Were they both very graceful?"
"Very graceful indeed."
"Why it must be Mrs. Saunders. Where did you see them?"
"In the Art Department."
"Yes. She came to ask me whether I would exhibit some of Cornelia's drawings, if I were she."
"And you told her you would?" her husband asked, taking his pipe out for the purpose.
"Of course I did. That was what she wished me to tell her."
Burton turned to Ludlow. "Had they taken many premiums?"
"No; the premiums had been bestowed on the crazy quilts and the medley pictures—what extraordinarily idiotic inventions!—and Miss Saunders was tearing down her sketches in the next section. One of them slipped through on the floor, and they came round after it to where I was."
