e present
day, has not only a musical, but a pictorial life of its own; its young
artists dub themselves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when they come
home scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival
art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky north.
Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a rough diamond
enough, had more or less moved with the times, like his brother Richard;
at any rate he had grown rich, had married a decent wife, and was glad
enough to befriend his dead brother's children, who wanted nothing of
him, and did their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their
good manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which he
touched the culture of the times, like so many business men; but it
pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art; so that when Rose
went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she found long-haired
artists and fiery musicians about the place, who excited and encouraged
her musical gift, who sketched her while she played, and talked to the
pretty, clever, unformed creature of London and Paris and Italy, and
set her pining for that golden _vie de Boheme_ which she alone
apparently of all artists was destined never to know.

For she was an artist--she would be an artist--let Catherine say what
she would! She came back from Manchester restless for she knew not what,
thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, determined to be free,
reckless, passionate; with Wagner and Brahms in her young blood; and
found Burwood waiting for her--Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely
valley, of which Catherine was the presiding genius. _Catherine!_ For
Rose, what a multitude of associations clustered round the name! To her
it meant everything at this moment against which her soul rebelled--the
most scrupulous order, the most rigid self-repression, the most
determined sacrificing of 'this warm kind world,' with all its
indefensible delights, to a cold other-world with its torturing
inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of her stolen joys at Manchester
or London, this mere name, the mere mental image of Catherine moving
through life, wrapped in a religious peace and certainty as austere as
they were beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute
surrender to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough to
chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless despair.
And at home, as the vicar said, the two sis