r ruin? What if he made a confederate
of Eleanor? 'Twas in this spirit that Bertie Stanhope set about his
wooing.

"But you are not going to leave Barchester?" asked Eleanor.

"I do not know," he replied; "I hardly know yet what I am going to
do. But it is at any rate certain that I must do something."

"You mean about your profession?" said she.

"Yes, about my profession, if you can call it one."

"And is it not one?" said Eleanor. "Were I a man, I know none I should
prefer to it, except painting. And I believe the one is as much in
your power as the other."

"Yes, just about equally so," said Bertie with a little touch of
inward satire directed at himself. He knew in his heart that he would
never make a penny by either.

"I have often wondered, Mr. Stanhope, why you do not exert yourself
more," said Eleanor, who felt a friendly fondness for the man with
whom she was walking. "But I know it is very impertinent in me to say
so."

"Impertinent!" said he. "Not so, but much too kind. It is much too
kind in you to take any interest in so idle a scamp."

"But you are not a scamp, though you are perhaps idle. And I do take
an interest in you, a very great interest," she added in a voice
which almost made him resolve to change his mind. "And when I call
you idle, I know you are only so for the present moment. Why can't
you settle steadily to work here in Barchester?"

"And make busts of the bishop, dean, and chapter? Or perhaps, if I
achieve a great success, obtain a commission to put up an elaborate
tombstone over a prebendary's widow, a dead lady with a Grecian nose,
a bandeau, and an intricate lace veil; lying of course on a marble
sofa from among the legs of which death will be creeping out and
poking at his victim with a small toasting-fork."

Eleanor laughed, but yet she thought that if the surviving prebendary
paid the bill, the object of the artist as a professional man would
in a great measure be obtained.

"I don't know about the dean and chapter and the prebendary's widow,"
said Eleanor. "Of course you must take them as they come. But the fact
of your having a great cathedral in which such ornaments are required
could not but be in your favour."

"No real artist could descend to the ornamentation of a cathedral,"
said Bertie, who had his ideas of the high ecstatic ambition of art,
as indeed all artists have who are not in receipt of a good income.
"Buildings should be fitted to grace the sculpture,