spoke, formed in the
majority of the audience a little picture or an idea which each now was
eager to give expression to. Most of the people there proposed to spend
their lives in the practice either of writing or painting, and merely
by looking at them it could be seen that, as they listened to Mr. Purvis
first, and then to Mr. Greenhalgh, they were seeing something done by
these gentlemen to a possession which they thought to be their own. One
person after another rose, and, as with an ill-balanced axe, attempted
to hew out his conception of art a little more clearly, and sat down
with the feeling that, for some reason which he could not grasp, his
strokes had gone awry. As they sat down they turned almost invariably to
the person sitting next them, and rectified and continued what they
had just said in public. Before long, therefore, the groups on the
mattresses and the groups on the chairs were all in communication with
each other, and Mary Datchet, who had begun to darn stockings again,
stooped down and remarked to Ralph:

"That was what I call a first-rate paper."

Both of them instinctively turned their eyes in the direction of the
reader of the paper. He was lying back against the wall, with his
eyes apparently shut, and his chin sunk upon his collar. Katharine was
turning over the pages of his manuscript as if she were looking for
some passage that had particularly struck her, and had a difficulty in
finding it.

"Let's go and tell him how much we liked it," said Mary, thus suggesting
an action which Ralph was anxious to take, though without her he would
have been too proud to do it, for he suspected that he had more interest
in Katharine than she had in him.

"That was a very interesting paper," Mary began, without any shyness,
seating herself on the floor opposite to Rodney and Katharine. "Will you
lend me the manuscript to read in peace?"

Rodney, who had opened his eyes on their approach, regarded her for a
moment in suspicious silence.

"Do you say that merely to disguise the fact of my ridiculous failure?"
he asked.

Katharine looked up from her reading with a smile.

"He says he doesn't mind what we think of him," she remarked. "He says
we don't care a rap for art of any kind."

"I asked her to pity me, and she teases me!" Rodney exclaimed.

"I don't intend to pity you, Mr. Rodney," Mary remarked, kindly, but
firmly. "When a paper's a failure, nobody says anything, whereas now,
just listen