it, Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off.  It was almost a Yankee country-girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like that, pure Anglo-Saxon.  Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin, slender in figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin, felt herself much more Southern in style than this blooming, bubbling, bustling Virginian.

“I don’t know,” she answered, slowly.

“Going to take po’traits,” suggested Miss Woodburn, “or just paint the ahdeal?” A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.

“I suppose I don’t expect to paint at all,” said Alma.  “I’m going to illustrate books—­if anybody will let me.”

“Ah should think they’d just joamp at you,” said Miss Woodburn.  “Ah’ll tell you what let’s do, Miss Leighton:  you make some pictures, and Ah’ll wrahte a book fo’ them.  Ah’ve got to do something.  Ali maght as well wrahte a book.  You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak.  But Ah don’t mand it.  I tell papa I shouldn’t ca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’ if it wasn’t fo’ the inconvenience.”

“Yes, it’s inconvenient,” said Alma; “but you forget it when you’re at work, don’t you think?”

“Mah, yes!  Perhaps that’s one reason why poo’ people have to woak so hawd-to keep their wands off their poverty.”

The girls both tittered, and turned from talking in a low tone with their backs toward their elders, and faced them.

“Well, Madison,” said Mr. Woodburn, “it is time we should go.  I bid you good-night, madam,” he bowed to Mrs. Leighton.  “Good-night,” he bowed again to Alma.

His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, but with a jolly cordiality of manner that deformalized it.  “We shall be roand raght soon in the mawning, then,” she threatened at the door.

“We shall be all ready for you,” Alma called after her down the steps.

“Well, Alma?” her mother asked, when the door closed upon them.

“She doesn’t know any more about art,” said Alma, “than—­nothing at all.  But she’s jolly and good-hearted.  She praised everything that was bad in my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself.  When a person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know where they belong artistically.”

Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh.  “I wish I knew where they belonged financially.  We shall have to get in two girls at once.  I shall have to go out the first thing in the morning, and then our troubles will begin.”

“Well, didn’t you want them to begin?  I will stay home and help you get ready.  Our prosperity couldn’t begin without the troubles, if you mean boarders, and boarders mean servants.  I shall be very glad to be afflicted with a cook for a while myself.”

“Yes; but we don’t know anything about these people, or whether they will be able to pay us.  Did she talk as if they were well off?”