imental. He required Esther to make her design on the spot
that he might see moment by moment what it was coming to, and half a
dozen times he condemned it and obliged her to begin anew. Almost every
day occurred some scene of discouragement which made Esther almost
regret that she had undertaken a task so hard.

Catherine, being encouraged by the idea that Esther was partly
struggling for her sake, often undertook to join in the battle and
sometimes got roughly handled for her boldness.

"Why can't you let her go her own way, Mr. Wharton, and see what she
means to do?" asked Catherine one morning, after a week of unprofitable
labor.

"Because she does not come here to go her own way, Miss Brooke, but to
go the right way."

"But don't you see that she is a woman, and you are trying to make a man
of her?"

"An artist must be man, woman and demi-god," replied Wharton sternly.

"You want me to be Michael Angelo," said Esther, "and I hate him. I
don't want to draw as badly as he did."

Wharton gave a little snort of wrath: "I want you to be above your
subject, whatever it is. Don't you see? You are trying to keep down on a
level with it. That is not the path to Paradise. Put heaven in Miss
Brooke's eyes! Heaven is not there now; only earth. She is a flower, if
you like. You are the real saint. It is your own paradise that St.
Cecilia is singing about. I want to make St. Cecilia glow with your
soul, not with Miss Brooke's. Miss Brooke has got no soul yet."

"Neither have I," groaned Esther, making up a little face at Wharton's
vehemence.

"No," said Wharton, seized with a gravity as sudden as his outbreak, "I
suppose not. A soul is like a bird, and needs a sharp tap on its shell
to open it. Never mind! One who has as much feeling for art as you have,
must have soul some where."

This sort of lecture might be well enough for Esther, if she had the
ability to profit by it, but Catherine had no mind to be thus treated as
though she were an early Christian lay-figure. She flushed at hearing
herself coolly flung aside like common clay, and her exquisite eyes half
filled with tears as she broke out:

"I believe you think I'm a beetle because I come from Colorado! Why may
I not have a soul as well as you?"

Wharton started at this burst of feeling; he felt as though he had
really cracked the egg-shell of what he called a soul, in the wrong
person; but he was not to be diverted from his lecture. "There, Miss
Dudley,"