with the old painter who came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows.  He contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything; but in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom the lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter concerning them as much as Alma Leighton.  He said that instruction would do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see, painted in an obsolescent manner.  His name was Beaton—­Angus Beaton; but he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was.  His father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native and ancestral manner in him.  He wore his black beard cut shorter than his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about art, which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French.  One of the ladies said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after it was over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of him.  None of the ladies was afraid of him, though they could not believe that he was really so deferential to their work as he seemed; and they knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington’s work, that he was just acting from principle.

They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated Alma’s work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment recognized her as a real sister in art.  He told her she ought to come to New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter’s private class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which finally resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were now making.  There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from past success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with boarders in New York.  Of course the outlay was much greater.  The rent of the furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their experiment would be little less than ruinous.

But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if it did not deserve it.  She was one of those people who believe that if you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen.  She acted on this superstition as if it were a religion.

“If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma,” she answered, “I don’t know where we should have been now.”