Henceforth she applied all her energies and feminine charms to the task of preventing this disaster, and her first effort was to make a conquest of Wharton.  Esther stood in fear of the painter, who was apt to be too earnest to measure his words with great care.  He praised little and found fault much.  He broke out in rage with all work that seemed to him weak or sentimental.  He required Esther to make her design on the spot that he might see moment by moment what it was coming to, and half a dozen times he condemned it and obliged her to begin anew.  Almost every day occurred some scene of discouragement which made Esther almost regret that she had undertaken a task so hard.

Catherine, being encouraged by the idea that Esther was partly struggling for her sake, often undertook to join in the battle and sometimes got roughly handled for her boldness.

“Why can’t you let her go her own way, Mr. Wharton, and see what she means to do?” asked Catherine one morning, after a week of unprofitable labor.

“Because she does not come here to go her own way, Miss Brooke, but to go the right way.”

“But don’t you see that she is a woman, and you are trying to make a man of her?”

“An artist must be man, woman and demi-god,” replied Wharton sternly.

“You want me to be Michael Angelo,” said Esther, “and I hate him.  I don’t want to draw as badly as he did.”

Wharton gave a little snort of wrath:  “I want you to be above your subject, whatever it is.  Don’t you see?  You are trying to keep down on a level with it.  That is not the path to Paradise.  Put heaven in Miss Brooke’s eyes!  Heaven is not there now; only earth.  She is a flower, if you like.  You are the real saint.  It is your own paradise that St. Cecilia is singing about.  I want to make St. Cecilia glow with your soul, not with Miss Brooke’s.  Miss Brooke has got no soul yet.”

“Neither have I,” groaned Esther, making up a little face at Wharton’s vehemence.

“No,” said Wharton, seized with a gravity as sudden as his outbreak, “I suppose not.  A soul is like a bird, and needs a sharp tap on its shell to open it.  Never mind!  One who has as much feeling for art as you have, must have soul some where.”

This sort of lecture might be well enough for Esther, if she had the ability to profit by it, but Catherine had no mind to be thus treated as though she were an early Christian lay-figure.  She flushed at hearing herself coolly flung aside like common clay, and her exquisite eyes half filled with tears as she broke out: 

“I believe you think I’m a beetle because I come from Colorado!  Why may I not have a soul as well as you?”

Wharton started at this burst of feeling; he felt as though he had really cracked the egg-shell of what he called a soul, in the wrong person; but he was not to be diverted from his lecture.  “There, Miss Dudley,” he said, “look at her now!” Then, catching a crayon, he continued:  “Wait!  Let me try it myself!” and began rapidly to draw the girl’s features.  Quite upset by this unexpected recoil of her attack, Catherine would have liked to escape, but the painter, when the fit was on him, became very imperious, and she dared not oppose his will.  When at length he finished his sketch, he had the civility to beg her pardon.