When Ludlow looked round up at him and answered with a pleasant light in his eye, "Well, I don't know exactly. What'll you give?" Burton spared his life, and became his friend. He called his wife to him, and they bought the picture, and afterwards they went to Ludlow's lodging, for he had no studio, and conscientiously painted in the open air, and bought others. They got the pictures dog cheap, as Burton said, for Ludlow was just beginning then, and his reputation which has never since become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant. They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up, and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range. Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for impressionism; and then he changed his mind all at once, and under an impulse of sudden patriotism, declared for the American sky, and the thin, crystalline, American air. His faith included American subjects, and when, after his arrival in New York, Burton wrote to claim a visit from him and ironically proposed the trotting-match at the County Fair as an attraction for his pencil, Ludlow remembered the trotting-matches he had seen in his boyhood, and came out to Pymantoning with a seriousness of expectation that alarmed and then amused his friends.
He was very glad that he had come, and that night, after the supper which lasted well into the early autumn lamp-light, he went out and walked the village streets under the September moon, seeing his picture everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them. Within their shadowy porches, or beside their gates, was
"The delight of happy laughter,
The delight of low replies,"
hushing itself at his approach, and breaking out again at his retreat. The air seemed full of love, and in the midst of his proud, gay hopes, he felt smitten with sudden isolation, such as youth knows in the presence of others' passion. He walked back to Burton's rather pensively, and got up to his room and went to bed after as little stay for talk with his hosts as he could make decent; he did not like to break with his melancholy.
He was roused from his first sleep by the sound of singing, which seemed to stop with his waking. There came a confused murmur of girls' and young men's voices, and Ludlow could see from his open window the dim shapes of the serenaders in the dark of the trees below. Then they were still, and all at once the silence was filled with a rich contralto note, carrying the song, till the whole choir of voices took up the burden. Nothing prettier could have happened anywhere in the world. Ludlow hung rapt upon the music till Burton flung up his window, as if to thank the singers. They stopped at the sound, and with gay shouts and shrieks, and a medley of wild laughter, skurried away into the farther darkness, where Ludlow heard them begin their serenade again under distant windows as little localized as any space of the sky.
VI.
Ludlow went back to New York and took up his work with vigor and with fervor. The picture of the County Fair, which he exhibited at the American Artists', ran a gauntlet of criticism in which it was belabored at once for its unimaginative vulgarity and its fantastic unreality; then it returned to his studio and remained unsold, while the days, weeks, months and years went by and left each their fine trace on him. His purposes dropped away, mostly unfulfilled, as he grew older and wiser, but his dreams remained and he was still rich in a vast future. His impressionism was somewhat modified; he offered his palette less frequently to the public; he now and then permitted a black object to appear in his pictures; his purples and greens were less aggressive. His moustache had grown so thick that it could no longer be brushed up at the points with just the effect he desired, and he suffered it to branch straight across his cheeks; his little dot of an imperial had become lost in the beard which he wore so conscientiously trimmed to a point that it might be described as religiously pointed. He was now twenty-seven.
At sixteen Cornelia Saunders had her first love-affair. It was with a young man who sold what he called art-goods by sample—satin banners, gilt rolling-pins, brass disks and keramics; he had permitted himself to speak to her on the train coming over from the Junction, where she took the cars for Pymantoning one afternoon after a day's shopping with her mother in Lakeland. It did not last very long, and in fact it hardly survived the brief stay which the young man made in Pymantoning, where his want of success in art-goods was probably owing to the fact that he gave his whole time to Cornelia, or rather Cornelia's mother, whom he found much more conversable; he played upon the banjo for her, and he danced a little clog-dance in her parlor, which was also her shop, to the accompaniment of his own whistling, first setting aside the bonnet-trees with their scanty fruitage of summer hats, and pushing the show-table against the wall. "Won't hurt 'em a mite," he reassured her, and he struck her as a careful as well as accomplished young man. His passion for Cornelia lingered a while in letters, which he proposed in parting, and then, about six months later, Mrs. Saunders received the newspaper announcement of his marriage to Miss Tweety Byers of Lakeland. There were "No Cards," but Mrs. Saunders made out, with Mrs. Burton's help, that Tweety was the infantile for the pet name of Sweety; and the marriage seemed a fit union for one so warm and true as the young traveller in art-goods.
Mrs. Saunders was a good deal surprised, but she did not suffer keenly from the disappointment which she had innocently done her best to bring upon her daughter. Cornelia, who had been the passive instrument of her romance, did not suffer from it at all, having always objected to the thickness of the young man's hands, and to the early baldness which gave him the Shakespearian brow he had so little use for. She laughed his memory to scorn, and employed the episode as best she could in quelling her mother's simple trust of passing strangers. They worked along together, in the easy, unambitious village fashion, and kept themselves in the average comfort, while the time went by and Cornelia had grown from a long, lean child to a tall and stately young girl, who carried herself with so much native grace and pride that she had very little attention from the village youth. She had not even a girl friendship, and her chief social resource was in her intimacy at the Burtons. She borrowed books of them, and read a good deal; and when she was seventeen she rubbed up her old studies and got a teacher's certificate for six months, and taught a summer term in a district at Burnt Pastures. She came home in the fall, and when she called at the Burtons' to get a book, as usual, Mrs. Burton said, "Nelie, you're not feeling very well, are you? Somehow you looked fagged."
"Well, I do feel queer," said the girl. "I seem to be in a kind of dream. It—scares me. I'm afraid I'm going to be sick."
"Oh, I guess not," Mrs. Burton answered comfortably. "You're just tired out. How did you like your school?"
"I hated it," said the girl, with a trembling chin and wet eyes. "I don't believe I'm fit for teaching. I won't try it any more; I'll stay at home and help mother."
"You ought to keep up your drawing," said Mrs. Burton in general admonition. "Do you draw any now?"
"Nothing much," said the girl.
"I should think you would, to please your mother. Don't you care anything for it yourself?"
"Yes; but I haven't the courage I had when I thought I knew it all. I don't think I should ever amount to anything. It would be a waste of time."
"I don't think so," said Mrs. Burton. "I believe you could be a great artist."
The girl laughed. "What ever became of that painter who visited you year before last at fair time?"
"Mr. Ludlow? Oh, he's in New York. He thought your sketches were
