“I don’t see anything to her.  What’s she doing?”

“Oh, just being made love to, I suppose.”

“She’s perfectly insipid!”

“You’re awfully articulate, mamma!  Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise that picture he’d draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it through that, and tilt his head first on one side and then on the other, and then look at you, as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse awhile, and moan a little and gasp, ’Isn’t your young lady a little too-too—­’ and then he’d try to get the word out of you, and groan and suffer some more; and you’d say, ‘She is, rather,’ and that would give him courage, and he’d say, ‘I don’t mean that she’s so very—­’ ’Of course not.’  ‘You understand?’ ‘Perfectly.  I see it myself, now.’  ’Well, then’—–­and he’d take your pencil and begin to draw—­’I should give her a little more—­Ah?’ ‘Yes, I see the difference.’—­’You see the difference?’ And he’d go off to some one else, and you’d know that you’d been doing the wishy-washiest thing in the world, though he hadn’t spoken a word of criticism, and couldn’t.  But he wouldn’t have noticed the expression at all; he’d have shown you where your drawing was bad.  He doesn’t care for what he calls the literature of a thing; he says that will take care of itself if the drawing’s good.  He doesn’t like my doing these chic things; but I’m going to keep it up, for I think it’s the nearest way to illustrating.”

She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.

“And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?” asked her mother.

“No,” said the girl, with her back still turned; and she added, “I believe he’s in New York; Mr. Wetmore’s seen him.”

“It’s a little strange he doesn’t call.”

“It would be if he were not an artist.  But artists never do anything like other people.  He was on his good behavior while he was with us, and he’s a great deal more conventional than most of them; but even he can’t keep it up.  That’s what makes me really think that women can never amount to anything in art.  They keep all their appointments, and fulfil all their duties just as if they didn’t know anything about art.  Well, most of them don’t.  We’ve got that new model to-day.”

“What new model?”

“The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about the old German; he’s splendid.  He’s got the most beautiful head; just like the old masters’ things.  He used to be Humphrey Williams’s model for his Biblical-pieces; but since he’s dead, the old man hardly gets anything to do.  Mr. Wetmore says there isn’t anybody in the Bible that Williams didn’t paint him as.  He’s the Law and the Prophets in all his Old Testament pictures, and he’s Joseph, Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in the New.”

“It’s a good thing people don’t know how artists work, or some of the most sacred pictures would have no influence,” said Mrs. Leighton.

“Why, of course not!” cried the girl.  “And the influence is the last thing a painter thinks of—­or supposes he thinks of.  What he knows he’s anxious about is the drawing and the color.  But people will never understand how simple artists are.  When I reflect what a complex and sophisticated being I am, I’m afraid I can never come to anything in art.  Or I should be if I hadn’t genius.”