to divine a compliment in this indefinite speech. She
said: "Well, I don't see myself why they didn't take it."

"There was probably no one to feel how much better they were," said
Ludlow.

"Well, that's what _I_ think," said the mother, "and it's what I tell
her." She stood looking from Ludlow to her daughter and back, and now
she ventured, seeing him so intent on the sketch he still held, "You an
artist?"

"A student of art," said Ludlow, with the effect of uncovering himself
in a presence.

The mother did not know what to make of it apparently; she said
blankly, "Oh!" and then added impressively, to her daughter: "Why don't
you show them to him, Cornelia?"

"I should think it a great favor," said Ludlow, intending to be
profoundly respectful. But he must have overdone it. The girl
majestically gave her drawings to her mother, and marched out of the
aisle.

Ludlow ignored her behavior, as if it had nothing to do with the
question, and began to look at the drawings, one after another, with
various inarticulate notes of comment imitated from a great French
master, and with various foreign phrases, such as "_Bon! Bon! Pas
mauvais! Joli! Chic!_" He seemed to waken from them to a consciousness
of the mother, and returned to English. "They are very interesting. Has
she had instruction?"

"Only in the High School, here. And she didn't seem to care any for
that. She seems to want to work more by herself."

"That's wrong," said Ludlow, "though she's probably right about the
High School."

The mother made bold to ask, "Where are _you_ taking lessons?"

"I?" said Ludlow, dreamily. "Oh! everywhere."

"I thought, perhaps," the mother began, and she stopped, and then
resumed, "How many lessons do you expect to take?"

IV.

Ludlow descended from the high horse which he saw it was really useless
for him to ride in that simple presence. "I didn't mean that I was a
student of art in that sense, exactly. I suppose I'm a painter of some
sort. I studied in Paris, and I'm working in New York--if that's what
you mean."

"Yes," said the lady, as if she did not know quite what she meant.

Ludlow still remained in possession of the sketches, and he now looked
at them with a new knot between his eyebrows. He had known at the first
glance, with the perception of one who has done things in any art, that
here was the possibility of things in his art, and he had spoken from a
generous and compassionate impulse, from his