matic; she had inspiration but not discipline, and her mother
mourned more over the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the Irish
girl than she rejoiced in those when one of Alma's great thoughts took
form in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in a matchless pudding.
The off-days came when her artistic nature was expressing itself in
charcoal, for she drew to the admiration of all among the lady boarders
who could not draw. The others had their reserves; they readily conceded
that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed instruction. On the
other hand, they were not so radical as to agree with the old painter
who came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows. He
contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything;
but in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom
the lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter
concerning them as much as Alma Leighton. He said that instruction would
do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from
the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see,
painted in an obsolescent manner. His name was Beaton--Angus Beaton; but
he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was. His
father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and
it had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of
native and ancestral manner in him. He wore his black beard cut shorter
than his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders
well thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked
about art, which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not
had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray
eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as
to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the
ladies said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after
it was over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel
afraid of him. None of the ladies was afraid of him, though they could
not believe that he was really so deferential to their work as he
seemed; and they knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington's
work, that he was just acting from principle.

They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated
Alma's work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal
comment recognized her