boy!" said the girl lightly. And then she added: "Do you mind if I think myself in her place and see if I can suggest a possible point at which she could be reached? I know her. I shouldn't consider her happy. At least not with what I call joy."
"What do you call joy?" asked Douglas.
"Being satisfied with your environment."
Douglas glanced at her, then at her surroundings, and looking into her eyes laughed quizzically.
"But if it were different, I am perfectly confident that I should work out joy from life," insisted Leslie. "It owes me joy! I'll have it, if I fight for it!"
"Leslie! Leslie! Be careful! You are challenging Providence. Stronger men than I have wrought chaos for their children," said a warning voice, as her father came behind her chair.
"Chaos or no, still I'd put up my fight for joy, Daddy," laughed the girl. "Only see, Preciousest!"
"One minute!" said her father, shaking hands with Douglas. "Now what is it, Leslie? Oh, I do see!"
"Take my chair and make friends," said the girl.
Mr. Winton seated himself, then began examining and turning the basket. "Indians?" he queried.
"Yes," said Douglas. "A particularly greasy squaw. I wish I might truthfully report an artist's Indian of the Minnehaha type, but alack, it was the same one I've seen ever since I've been in the city, and that you've seen for years before my arrival."
Mr. Winton still turned the basket.
"I've bought their stuff for years, because neither Leslie nor her mother ever would tolerate fat carnations and overgrown roses so long as I could find a scrap of arbutus, a violet or a wake-robin from the woods. We've often motored up and penetrated the swamp I fancy these came from, for some distance, but later in the season; it's so very boggy now. Aren't these rather wonderful?" He turned to his daughter.
"Perfectly, Daddy," she said. "Perfectly!"
"But I don't mean for the Creator," explained Mr. Winton. "I am accustomed to His miracles. Every day I see a number of them. I mean for the squaw."
"I'd have to know the squaw and understand her viewpoint," said Leslie.
"She had it in her tightly clenched fist," laughed Douglas. "One, I'm sure; anyway, not over two."
"That hasn't a thing to do with the art with which she made the basket and filled it with just three perfect plants," said Leslie.
"You think there is real art in her anatomy?" queried Mr. Winton.
"Bear witness, O you treasures of gold!" cried Leslie, waving toward the basket.
"There was another," explained Douglas as he again described the osier basket.
Mr. Winton nodded. He looked at his daughter.
"I like to think, young woman, that you were born with and I have cultivated what might be called artistic taste in you," he said. "Granted the freedom of the tamarack swamp, could you have done better?"
"Not so well, Daddy! Not nearly so well. I never could have defaced what you can see was a noble big tree by cutting that piece of bark, while I might have worshipped until dragged away, but so far as art and I are concerned, the slippers would still be under their tamarack."
"You are begging the question, Leslie," laughed her father. "I was not discussing the preservation of the wild, I was inquiring into the state of your artistic ability. If you had no hesitation about taking the flowers, could you have gone to that swamp, collected the material and fashioned and filled a more beautiful basket that this?"
"How can I tell, Daddy?" asked the girl. "There's only one way to learn. I'll forget my scruples, you get me a pair of rubber boots, then we'll drive to the tamarack swamp and experiment."
"We'll do it!" cried Mr. Winton. "The very first half day I can spare, we'll do it. And you Douglas, you will want to come with us, of course."
"Why, 'of course,'" laughed Leslie.
"Because he started the expedition with his golden slippers. When it come to putting my girl, and incidentally my whole family, in competition with an Indian squaw on a question of art, naturally, her father and one of her best friends would want to be present."
"But maybe 'Minnie' went alone, and what chance would her work have with you two for judges?" asked Leslie.
"We needn't be the judges," said Douglas Bruce quietly.
"We can put this basket in the basement in a cool, damp place, where it will keep perfectly for a week. When you make your basket we can find the squaw and bring her down with us. Lowry could display the results side by side. He could call up whomever you consider the most artistic man and woman in the city and get their decision. You'd be willing to abide by that, wouldn't you?"
"Surely, but it wouldn't be fair to the squaw," explained Leslie. "I'd have had the benefit of her art to begin on."
"It would," said Mr. Winton. "Does not every artist living, painter, sculptor, writer, what you will, have the benefit of all art that has gone before?"
"You agree?" Leslie turned to Douglas.
"Your father's argument is a truism."
"But I will know that I am on trial. She didn't. Is it fair to her?" persisted Leslie.
"For begging the question, commend me to a woman," said Mr. Winton. "The point we began at, was not what you could do in a contest with her. She went to the swamp and brought from it some flower baskets. It is perfectly fair to her to suppose that they are her best art. Now what we are proposing to test is whether the finest product of our civilization, as embodied in you, can go to the same swamp, and from the same location surpass her work. Do I make myself clear?"
"Perfectly clear, Daddy, and it would be fair," conceded Leslie. "But it is an offence punishable with a heavy fine to peel a birch tree; while I wouldn't do it, if it were not."
"Got her to respect the law anyway," said Mr. Winton to Douglas. "The proposition, Leslie, was not that you do the same thing, but that from the same source you outdo her. You needn't use birch bark if it involves your law-abiding soul."
"Then it's all settled. You must hurry and take me before the lovely plants have flowered," said Leslie.
"I'll go day after to-morrow," promised Mr. Winton.
"In order to make our plan work, it is necessary that I keep these orchids until that time," said Leslie.
"You have a better chance than the lady who drew the osier basket has of keeping hers," said Mr. Winton. "If I remember I have seen the slippers in common earth quite a distance from the lake, while the moccasins demand bog moss, water and swamp mists and dampness."
"I have seen slippers in the woods myself," said Leslie. "I think the conservatory will do, so they shall go there right now. I have to be fair to 'Minnie.'"
"Let me carry them for you," offered Douglas, arising.
"'Scuse us. Back in a second, Daddy,"
