home in his studio. In greeting me he
remarked in a mood of sly mischief, "You will not approve of these
girls--they are on their way to Paris to study sculpture, but I want
you to know them. They are Janet Scudder and my sister Zulime."

Up to this time, notwithstanding our growing friendship, I was not aware
that he had a sister, but I greeted Miss Taft with something like
fraternal interest. She was a handsome rather pale girl with fine,
serious gray-blue eyes, and a composed and graceful manner. Her profile
was particularly good and as she was not greatly interested in looking
at me I had an excellent chance to study her.

Lorado explained "My sister has been in Kansas visiting mother and
father and is now on her way to New York to take a steamer for
France.... She intends to remain abroad for two years," he added.

Knowing that I was at that moment in the midst of writing a series of
essays on _The National Spirit in American Art_, he expected this to
draw my fire--and it did. "Why go abroad," I demanded bluntly. "Why not
stay right here and study modeling with your brother? Paris is no place
for an American artist."

With an amused glance at her friend, Miss Scudder, Miss Taft replied in
a tone of tolerant contempt for my ignorance, "One doesn't get very far
in art without Paris."

Somewhat nettled by her calm inflection and her supercilious glance I
hotly retorted, "Nonsense! You can acquire all the technic you require,
right here in Chicago. If you are in earnest, and are really in search
of instruction you can certainly get it in Boston or New York. Stay in
your own country whatever you do. This sending students at their most
impressionable age to the Old World to absorb Old World conventions and
prejudices is all wrong. It makes of them something which is neither
American nor European. Suppose France did that? No nation has an art
worth speaking of unless it has a national spirit."

Of course this is only a brief report of my harangue which might just
as well have remained unspoken, so far as Miss Taft was concerned, and
when her brother came to her aid I retired worsted. The two pilgrims
went their way leaving me to hammer Lorado at my leisure.

I wish I could truthfully say that this brief meeting with Zulime Taft
filled me with a deep desire to see her again but I cannot do so. On the
contrary, my recollection is that I considered her a coldly-haughty
young person running away from her native land,