As a rule, she was willing to lend herself to art, and was a patient model, until one rash young man took it into his head, that he must have Emma Campbell as a favorite old attendant upon the Queen of Sheba he proposed to paint.  He was a very earnest young German, that painter, speaking fairly good English.  Emma had liked him more than most; but her faith received a blow from which it never recovered.  That young man wished to paint her au naturel—­her, Emma Campbell, who had been a member in good standing of the Young Sons and Daughters of Zion, the Children of Mary Magdalen, and the Burying Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Rising Star in the Bonds of Love!  In the altogether!  Emma Campbell gasped like a hooked fish.  She made a nozzle of her mouth and protruded her eyes.  She said ominously: 

“I bawn nekked, but I ain’t had nuttin’ to do wid dat.  Dat de fust en de last time I show up wid mah rind out o’ doors.  I been livin’ in clo’es evuh sence, en I ’speck to die in clo’es.”

The artist, who wanted Emma in his picture, tried to make her understand.  He reasoned with her manfully: 

“Ach, silly nigger-woman!  Clothes, clothes!  What are clothes!  See, now:  you are the Queen of Sheba’s old slave.  Your large black feet and legs are bare, a glittering amulet swings between your withered breasts of an old African, you wear heavy bracelets and anklets, around your lean flanks is a little, thin striped apron, and you hold in your hand the great fan of peacock feathers!  Magnificent!  You are the queen’s old slave, imbecile!”

“Is I?  Boy, is you evuh hear tell o’ Mistuh Abe Linkum?  Aftuh Gin’ral Sherman bun down de big house smack en smoove, en tote off all de cow en mule en hawg en t’ing, en dem Yankees tief all de fowl, en we-all run lak rabbit, Mistuh Linkum done sen’ word we ’s free.  En jus’ lak Mistuh Linkum say, hit ‘s so; aftuh us git shet o’ Gin’ral Sherman, we ‘s free.  All dat time I been a-wearin’ clo’es, en now you come en tarrygate me, sayin’ I got to stan’ up in de nekked rind en wave fedders ‘cause I in slaveryment?  You bes’ ain’t let Mistuh Peter Champneys hear you talkin’ lak dat!”

The bewildered and baffled young man raved in three languages, but Emma Campbell flatly refused either to be in “slaveryment” or in the “nekked rind.”  Visions of herself being caught and painted bare-legged, with a trifling little dab of an apron tied around her waist even as one ties a bit of ribbon around the cat’s neck, and of this scandal being ferreted out by the deacons, sisters, and brethren, of the Mount Zion Baptist Church in Riverton, South Carolina, haunted her and made her projeck darkly.  When she ventured to voice her opinion to Mist’ Peter, he clapped her on the back and grinned.  Emma Campbell began to look with a jaundiced eye upon art and the votaries of art.

She was relieved when Peter decided to spend the summer on the coast; she was a coast woman herself, and she longed for the smell of the sea.  And then, to add to her joy, had come this last, astonishing news:  “dat gal” was going to divorce Mist’ Peter!  That incomprehensible marriage would be done away with, that grim, red-headed dragoness would go out of their lives!  Emma’s speretuals took a more hopeful trend; and Peter whistled while he worked.