第39章 PART SECOND(5)

"Well,it's just beautiful,Miss Leighton;it's grand.Ah suppose it's raght expensive,now?Mah goodness!we have to cyoant the coast so much nowadays;it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it.Ah'd like to hah something once without askin'the price.""Well,if you didn't ask it,"said Alma,"I don't believe Mr.Wetmore would ever know what the price of his lessons was.He has to think,when you ask him.""Why,he most be chomming,"said Miss Woodburn."Perhaps Ah maght get the lessons for nothing from him.Well,Ah believe in my soul Ah'll trah.Now ho'did you begin?and ho'do you expect to get anything oat of it?"She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun and earnest,and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early nineteenth-century face,round,arch,a little coquettish,but extremely sensible and unspoiled-looking,such as used to be painted a good deal in miniature at that period;a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist at the temples helped the effect;a high comb would have completed it,Alma felt,if she had her bonnet off.It was almost a Yankee country-girl type;but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was,like that,pure Anglo-Saxon.Alma herself,with her dull,dark skin,slender in figure,slow in speech,with aristocratic forms in her long hands,and the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin,felt herself much more Southern in style than this blooming,bubbling,bustling Virginian.

"I don't know,"she answered,slowly.

"Going to take po'traits,"suggested Miss Woodburn,"or just paint the ahdeal?"A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.

"I suppose I don't expect to paint at all,"said Alma."I'm going to illustrate books--if anybody will let me.""Ah should think they'd just joamp at you,"said Miss Woodburn."Ah'll tell you what let's do,Miss Leighton:you make some pictures,and Ah'll wrahte a book fo'them.Ah've got to do something.Ali maght as well wrahte a book.You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak.But Ah don't mand it.I tell papa I shouldn't ca'fo'the disgrace of bein'poo'if it wasn't fo'the inconvenience.""Yes,it's inconvenient,"said Alma;"but you forget it when you're at work,don't you think?""Mah,yes!Perhaps that's one reason why poo'people have to woak so hawd-to keep their wands off their poverty."The girls both tittered,and turned from talking in a low tone with their backs toward their elders,and faced them.

"Well,Madison,"said Mr.Woodburn,"it is time we should go.I bid you good-night,madam,"he bowed to Mrs.Leighton."Good-night,"he bowed again to Alma.

His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase,but with a jolly cordiality of manner that deformalized it."We shall be roand raght soon in the mawning,then,"she threatened at the door.

"We shall be all ready for you,"Alma called after her down the steps.

"Well,Alma?"her mother asked,when the door closed upon them.

"She doesn't know any more about art,"said Alma,"than--nothing at all.

But she's jolly and good-hearted.She praised everything that was bad in my sketches,and said she was going to take lessons herself.When a person talks about taking lessons,as if they could learn it,you know where they belong artistically."Mrs.Leighton shook her head with a sigh."I wish I knew where they belonged financially.We shall have to get in two girls at once.Ishall have to go out the first thing in the morning,and then our troubles will begin.""Well,didn't you want them to begin?I will stay home and help you get ready.Our prosperity couldn't begin without the troubles,if you mean boarders,and boarders mean servants.I shall be very glad to be afflicted with a cook for a while myself.""Yes;but we don't know anything about these people,or whether they will be able to pay us.Did she talk as if they were well off?""She talked as if they were poor;poo'she called it.""Yes,how queerly she pronounced,"said Mrs.Leighton."Well,I ought to have told them that I required the first week in advance.""Mamma!If that's the way you're going to act!""Oh,of course,I couldn't,after he wouldn't let her bargain for the rooms.I didn't like that.""I did.And you can see that they were perfect ladies;or at least one of them."Alma laughed at herself,but her mother did not notice.

"Their being ladies won't help if they've got no money.It 'll make it all the worse.""Very well,then;we have no money,either.We're a match for them any day there.We can show them that two can play at that game."III.

Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'studios.A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;casts of feet,hands,faces hung to nails about;prints,sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there lower down;a rickety table,with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it;an easel,with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it;a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness,with its head on one side,and a stocking on one leg,and a Japanese dress dropped before it;dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor;canvases faced to the mop-board;an open trunk overflowing with costumes:

these features one might notice anywhere.But,besides,there was a bookcase with an unusual number of books in it,and there was an open colonial writing-desk,claw-footed,brass-handled,and scutcheoned,with foreign periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf,and some pages of manu scattered among them.Above all,there was a sculptor's revolving stand,supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling,with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.