ey began work prolonged itself till the time
for the tea had come. On the days when Mr. Plaisdell dropped in for a
cup, the talk took such a range that the early dark fell before it
ended, and then Cornelia had to stay for dinner and to be sent home in
Mrs. Maybough's coupe.

She had never supposed there was anything like it in all the world.
Money, and, in a certain measure, the things that money could buy, were
imaginable in Pymantoning; but joys so fine, so simple as these, were
what she could not have forecast from any ground of experience or
knowledge. She tried to give her mother a notion of what they said and
did; but she told her frankly she never could understand. Mrs.
Saunders, in fact, could not see why it was so exciting; she read
Cornelia's letters to Mrs. Burton, who said she could see, and she told
Mrs. Saunders that, she would like it as much as Cornelia did, if she
were in her place; that she was a kind of Bohemian herself.

She tried to explain what Bohemian meant, and what Bohemia was; but
this is what no one can quite do. Charmian herself, who aimed to be a
perfect Bohemian, was uncertain of the ways and means of operating the
Bohemian life, when she had apparently thrown off all the restrictions,
for the afternoon, at least, that prevented its realization. She had a
faultless setting for it. There never was a girl's studio that was more
like a man's studio, an actual studio. Mr. Ludlow himself praised it;
he said he felt at home in it, and he liked it because it was not
carried a bit too far. Charmian's mother had left her free to do what
she wished, and there was not a convention of Philistine housekeeping
in the arrangement of the place. Everything was in the admired disorder
of an artist's environment; but Mrs. Maybough insisted upon neatness.
Even here Charmian had to submit to a compromise. She might and did
keep things strewn all about in her studio, but every morning the
housemaid was sent in to sweep it and dust it. She was a housemaid of
great intelligence, and an imperfect sense of humor, and she obeyed
with unsmiling scrupulosity the instructions she had to leave
everything in Miss Charmian's studio exactly as she found it, but to
leave it clean. In consequence, this home of art had an effect of
indescribable coldness and bareness, and there were at first some
tempestuous scenes which Cornelia witnessed between Charmian and her
mother, when the girl vainly protested:

"But don't you _s