way first, and then let
other people take theirs. It was in this spirit that, mounted on a
table, she painted the great battle-piece that covered the north wall of
the nursery; and with equal heroism she met the unrighteous Nemesis that
waits upon mortal success, and skipped off to bed at three o'clock in
the afternoon as if to a tea-party. Ted worshipped his sister, because
of her courage and resource, because of her fuzzy black hair cut short
like a boy's, for the strength of her long limbs, and for a hundred
other reasons. And Katherine loved Ted with a passion all the more
intense because he was the only creature she knew that would let itself
be loved comfortably; for "Papa" was an abstraction, and "Nurse" erred
on the opposite extreme, being a terribly concrete reality, with a great
many acute angles about her, which was a drawback to demonstrations of
affection.

One day Katherine mixed some colours for Ted and taught him how to
manage a pencil and paint-brush. That was just before she went to
school, and then Ted said to himself, "I too will paint battle-pieces";
and he painted them in season and out of season, and was obliged to hide
them away in drawers and cupboards and places, for there was no one to
care for them now that Kathy was gone. As for that headstrong young
person, her method was so far successful that when she was eighteen it
began to be rumoured in the family that Katherine would do great things,
but that Ted was an idle young beggar. The boy had shown no talent for
anything in particular, and nobody had thought of his future: not
Katherine--she was too busy with her own--and certainly not his father,
who at the best of times lived piously in the past with the memory of
his dead wife, and was day by day loosening his hold upon the present.
For Ted "Papa" became more and more an abstraction, until a higher Power
withdrew him altogether from earthly affairs.

Mr. Haviland had lived in a melancholy gentility on a pension which died
with him, and at his death the children were left with nothing but the
pittance they inherited from their mother. When the family met in solemn
conclave to decide the fate of Katherine and Ted, it learned that
Katherine, true to her old principles, had taken the decision into her
own hands. She meant to live for art and by art, and Uncle James was
much mistaken if he thought that an expensive training was to be flung
away upon a "niggling amateur." At any rate, she had t