nd questioned Alma about them.

"Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?" she said, in friendly
banter, when Alma owned to having done the things. "Ah've a great notion
to take a few lessons mahself. Who's yo' teachah?"

Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's class, and Miss Woodburn
said: "Well, it's just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand. Ah suppose
it's raght expensive, now? Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so
much nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah'd like to
hah something once without askin' the price."

"Well, if you didn't ask it," said Alma, "I don't believe Mr. Wetmore
would ever know what the price of his lessons was. He has to think, when
you ask him."

"Why, he most be chomming," said Miss Woodburn. "Perhaps Ah maght get
the lessons for nothing from him. Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah'll
trah. Now ho' did you begin? and ho' do you expect to get anything oat
of it?" She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of
fun and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early
nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely
sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal
in miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and
twist at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed
it, Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off. It was almost a Yankee
country-girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was,
like that, pure Anglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin,
slender in figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her
long hands, and the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin,
felt herself much more Southern in style than this blooming, bubbling,
bustling Virginian.

"I don't know," she answered, slowly.

"Going to take po'traits," suggested Miss Woodburn, "or just paint the
ahdeal?" A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.

"I suppose I don't expect to paint at all," said Alma. "I'm going to
illustrate books--if anybody will let me."

"Ah should think they'd just joamp at you," said Miss Woodburn. "Ah'll
tell you what let's do, Miss Leighton: you make some pictures, and Ah'll
wrahte a book fo' them. Ah've got to do something. Ali maght as well
wrahte a book. You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But
Ah don't mand it. I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein'
poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience."

"Ye