The successful painter looked at the sketch in silence for a full minute, holding it off at arm’s length.  Finally, she laid it down on the table, murmuring, “And after three years’ hard work!”

“Only a year’s real work,” Kitty broke in eagerly.  “I have only been here a year, you know; and those two years at home I ought not to count, for I did not work then as I do now.”

“Why not?” asked FrA¤ulein Vogel sharply.  And Kitty changed color.

“Ah, one must not ask questions,” FrA¤ulein Vogel remarked; “but one can have plenty of suspicions.  I dare say you were in love, and, as love failed, you have taken to art.  So it goes with women.  Everything but marriage is a pis-aller.”

Kitty half rose:  the stray arrow had sped home, and it rankled in a new wound.

“I am a woman myself,” added FrA¤ulein Vogel, with a droll smile that melted the girl’s anger in an instant.

Kitty dropped down on the sofa.  “Well,” she said gayly, “I grant that I was in love once on a time; but that is all past.  Now I want to be a painter.  Listen:  I have not much money, I have no friends,—­that is, friends such as we read about,—­and I must learn to make some money.  When I am thirty I shall begin to make money; otherwise—­”

“You are spending your capital,” said FrA¤ulein Vogel.

“If I spent only my income I should either wear shoes and no clothes, or clothes and no shoes,” answered Kitty, laughing, with a little air of recklessness that sat well on her.  “Besides,” she added sagely, “it is well to burn one’s ships.  Sink or swim.”

“But you are quite sure of swimming?” said FrA¤ulein Vogel, taking up the picture again and looking at it closely.

“It is very bad,” Kitty said.

“Abominable,” said the painter.  She drew a long breath and shook her head.  “Abominable,” she repeated, almost as though such an abominable piece of work demanded respect. “Ach!  You leave old Zweifarbe’s studio,” she exclaimed.  “Send your easel over to me.  You want to make some money?  Good.  There are many artists here in DAYsseldorf who say I cannot paint; there is not one who will say I have not made money.  Perhaps I can teach you.”  And FrA¤ulein Vogel burst out laughing, while Kitty stared at her in blank surprise.

“But you have never taken pupils,” she stammered.

“I have never died; but I suppose I shall,” was the response.

And so old Zweifarbe lost a pupil,—­for Kitty’s easel was straightway borne on the back of a sturdy dienstmann to FrA¤ulein Vogel’s studio.  What a chatter, what a commotion, it caused in the nest of painters!  They chirped and gossiped and pecked each other like a flock of sparrows.  The Frau Pastorin expressed the popular sentiment when she discussed Hedwig Vogel’s eccentricities.

“How much a lesson?” she said, half closing one shrewd gray eye.  “How much a lesson?  Ah, she would not take pupils,—­no, no, not while she was Hedwig Vogel; and der liebe Gott knows she will never be Hedwig anything else.  But she will make an exception for our deer Mees Varing; oh, yes, an exception!  Wait till Mees Varing’s rich American friends come along and buy some of the great Vogel’s pictures.  You will see.”