in my horrid profession,"
protested the personage so designated. "One's bowled about like a
cricket-ball, unable to answer for one's freedom or one's comfort from
one moment to another."

"Oh ours is the true profession--Biddy's and mine," Nick broke out,
setting up his canvas; "the career of liberty and peace, of charming
long mornings spent in a still north light and in the contemplation, I
may even say in the company, of the amiable and the beautiful."

"That certainty's the case when Biddy comes to see you," Peter returned.

Biddy smiled at him. "I come every day. Anch'io son pittore! I encourage
Nick awfully."

"It's a pity I'm not a martyr--she'd bravely perish with me," Nick said.

"You are--you're a martyr--when people say such odious things!" the girl
cried. "They do say them. I've heard many more than I've repeated to
you."

"It's you yourself then, indignant and loyal, who are the martyr,"
observed Peter, who wanted greatly to be kind to her.

"Oh I don't care!"--but she threw herself, flushed and charming, into a
straight appeal to him. "Don't you think one can do as much good by
painting great works of art as by--as by what papa used to do? Don't you
think art's necessary to the happiness, to the greatness of a people?
Don't you think it's manly and honourable? Do you think a passion for
it's a thing to be ashamed of? Don't you think the artist--the
conscientious, the serious one--is as distinguished a member of society
as any one else?"

Peter and Nick looked at each other and laughed at the way she had got
up her subject, and Nick asked their kinsman if she didn't express it
all in perfection. "I delight in general in artists, but I delight still
more in their defenders," Peter made reply, perhaps a little meagrely,
to Biddy.

"Ah don't attack me if you're wise!" Nick said.

"One's tempted to when it makes Biddy so fine."

"Well, that's the way she encourages me: it's meat and drink to me,"
Nick went on. "At the same time I'm bound to say there's a little
whistling in the dark in it."

"In the dark?" his sister demanded.

"The obscurity, my dear child, of your own aspirations, your mysterious
ambitions and esthetic views. Aren't there some heavyish shadows there?"

"Why I never cared for politics."

"No, but you cared for life, you cared for society, and you've chosen
the path of solitude and concentration."

"You horrid boy!" said Biddy.

"Give it up, that arduous steep--give it up