“I might as well begin at the beginning.”  There was a note in her voice that all at once made me see the long years of suffering which had been hers.  “Only the beginning is so commonplace that it lacks interest.  It is the record of a very mediocre stenographer with aspirations.”

That she was speaking of herself her tone told me, but I was genuinely surprised.  Mrs. Underwood was the last woman in the world one would picture as holding down a stenographer’s position.

“I can’t remember when I didn’t have in the back of my brain the idea of learning to draw,” she went on, “but it took years and years of uphill work and saving to get a chance.  I was an orphan, with nobody to care whether I lived or died, and nothing but my own efforts to depend on.  But I stuck to it, working in the daytime and studying evenings and holidays till at last I began to get a foothold, and then when I had enough to put by to risk it I went to Paris.”

Her voice was as matter of fact as if she were describing a visit to the family butcher shop.  But I visualized the busy, plucky years with their reward of Paris as if I had been a spectator of them.

“Of course, by the time I got there I was almost old enough to be the mother, or, at least, the elder sister of most of the boys and girls I met, and I had learned life and experience in a good, hard school.  Some of the youngsters got the habit of coming to me with all their troubles, fancied or real.  I made some stanch friends in those days, but never a stancher, truer one than Dicky Graham.

“Tell me, dear girl, when you were teaching those history classes, did any of your boy pupils fall in love with you?”

I answered her with an embarrassed little laugh.  Her question called up memories of shy glances, gifts of flowers and fruit, boyish confidences—­all the things which fall to the lot of any teacher of boys.

“Well, then, you will understand me when I tell you that in the studio days in Paris Dicky imagined himself quite in love with me.”

There was something in her tone and manner which took all the sting out of her words for me.  All the jealousy and real concern which I had spent on this old attachment of my husband for Mrs. Underwood vanished as I listened to her.  She might have been Dicky’s mother, speaking of his early and injudicious fondness for green apples.

“I shall always be proud of the way I managed Dicky that time.”  Her voice still held the amused maternal note.  “It’s so easy for an older woman to spoil a boy’s life in a case like that if she’s despicable enough to do it.  But, you see, I was genuinely fond of Dicky, and yet not the least bit in love with him, and I was able, without his guessing it, to keep the management of the affair in my own hands.  So when he woke up, as boys always do, to the absurdity of the idea, there was nothing in his recollections of me to spoil our friendship.