“I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby,” said the girl.  “And if it’s worse to be in New York, you see what your despair’s done, mamma.  But what’s the use?  You meant well, and I don’t blame you.  You can’t expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it.  Perhaps you’ve used too much of it.”  The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton laughed, too.  Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance and reflected them.  Alma got up and took a pose before the mirror, which she then transferred to her sketch.  The room was pinned about with other sketches, which showed with fantastic indistinctness in the shaded gaslight.  Alma held up the drawing.  “How do you like it?”

Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to look at it.  “You’ve got the man’s face rather weak.”

“Yes, that’s so.  Either I see all the hidden weakness that’s in men’s natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my own weakness into them.  Either way, it’s a drawback to their presenting a truly manly appearance.  As long as I have one of the miserable objects before me, I can draw him; but as soon as his back’s turned I get to putting ladies into men’s clothes.  I should think you’d be scandalized, mamma, if you were a really feminine person.  It must be your despair that helps you to bear up.  But what’s the matter with the young lady in young lady’s clothes?  Any dust on her?”

“What expressions!” said Mrs. Leighton.  “Really, Alma, for a refined girl you are the most unrefined!”

“Go on—­about the girl in the picture!” said Alma, slightly knocking her mother on the shoulder, as she stood over her.

“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.”