vases. But the process
of popping made them all very red in the face; they had to take it by
turns, for she would not let Ludlow hold the popper the whole time.
They had a snowy heap of corn at last, which she put on the hearth
before them in the hollow of a Japanese shield, detached from a suit of
armor, for that use. They sat on the hearth to eat it, and they told
ghost-stories and talked of the most psychological things they could
think of. In all this Charmian put Cornelia forward as much as she
dared, and kept herself in a sort of impassioned abeyance. If Cornelia
had been the most jealous and exacting of principals she could not have
received from her second a more single and devoted allegiance.
Charmian's joy in her fortunately mounted in proportion to the devotion
she paid her, rather than Cornelia's gratitude for it. She did not like
to talk of herself, and these seances were nothing if not strictly
personal; but Charmian talked for her, and represented her in phases of
interest which Cornelia repudiated with a laugh, or denied outright,
without scruple, when the invention was too bold. Charmian contrived
that she should acquire the greater merit, from her refusals of it, and
went on to fresh self-sacrifices in her behalf.

Sometimes she started the things they talked of; not because she ever
seemed to have been thinking of them, or of anything, definitely, but
because she was always apparently letting her mind wander about in
space, and chanced upon them there. Mostly, however, the suggestions
came from Ludlow. He talked of art, its methods, its principles, its
duties to the age, the people, the civilization; the large moral uses,
which kindled Charmian's fancy, and made Cornelia laugh when Charmian
proposed a scheme for the relief and refinement of the poor on the East
Side, by frescoing the outsides of the tenement houses in Mott Street
and Mulberry Bend, with subjects recalling the home life of the
dwellers there: rice-fields and tea-plantations for the Chinese, and
views of Etna and Vesuvius and their native shores for the Sicilians
and Neapolitans, with perhaps religious histories.

Ludlow had to explain that he had not meant the employment of any such
direct and obvious means, but the gradual growth of a conscience in
art. Cornelia thought him vague, but it seemed clear to Charmian. She
said, "Oh, yes; _that_," and she made tea, and had him set fire to some
pieces of Southern lightwood on her hearth, fo