her hair about the shoulders of her nightgown, repeating Rossetti to the wakeful budding garden, especially as it was for herself she did it—­nobody else saw her.  She knelt there partly because of a vague desire to taste the essence of the spring and the garden and Rossetti at once, and partly because she felt the romance of the foolish situation.  She knew of the shadow her hair made around her throat, and that her eyes were glorious in the moonlight.  Going back to bed, she paused before the looking-glass and wafted a kiss, as she blew the candle out, to the face she saw there.  It was such a pretty face, and so full of tire spirit of.  Rossetti and the moonlight, that she couldn’t help it.  Then she slept, dreamlessly, comfortably, and late; and in the morning she had never taken cold.

Philadelphia had pointed and sharpened all this.  The girl’s training there had vitalized her brooding dreams of producing what she worshipped, had given shape and direction to her informal efforts, had concentrated them upon charcoal and canvas.  There was an enthusiasm for work in the Institute, a canonization of names, a blazing desire to imitate that tried hard to fan itself into originality.  Elfrida kindled at once, and felt that her soul had lodged forever In her fingers, that art had found for her, once for all, a sacred embodiment.  She spoke with subdued feeling of its other shapes; she was at all points sympathetic; but she was no longer at all points desirous.  Her aim was taken.  She would not write novels or compose operas; she would paint.  There was some renunciation in it and some humility.  The day she came home, looking over a dainty sandalwood box full of early verses, twice locked against her mother’s eye, “The desire of the moth for the star,” she said to herself; but she did not tear them up.  That would have been brutal.

Elfrida wanted to put off opening the case that held her year’s work until next day.  She quailed somewhat in anticipation of her parents’ criticisms as a matter of fact; she would have preferred to postpone parrying them.  She acknowledged this to herself with a little irritation that it should be so, but when her father insisted, chisel in hand, she went down on her knees with charming willingness to help him.  Mrs. Bell took a seat on the sofa and clasped her hands with the expression of one who prepares for prayer.

One by one Mr. Leslie Bell drew out his daughter’s studies and copies, cutting their strings, clearing them of their paper wrappings, and standing each separately against the wall in his crisp, business-like way.  They were all mounted and framed; they stood very well against the wall; but Mr. Bell, who began hopefully, was presently obliged to try to hide his disappointment, the row was so persistently black and white.  Mrs. Bell, on the sofa, had the look of postponing her devotions.

“You seem to have done a great many of these—­etchings,” said Mr. Bell.