f your drawing, and
the badness of your perspective, when you have got so far as to have a
feeling for a scale of colour and the tone of a picture."

"Well, I suppose I can learn it all over again," said Rose, with a
mixture of spirit and doggedness, forcing herself not to betray further
resentment, and to swallow a little girlish weakness at the
uncompromising treatment she was receiving. What would May and Dora say?
But she durst not trust herself to think of them.

"Of course," answered Hester, opening widely a pair of singularly clear
keen eyes. "Do you think I should have taken the trouble to say as much
if I had thought otherwise?"

It was the one dubious compliment which Rose extracted, without meaning
it, from the fault-finder.

Hester's openly expressed desire was to be an artist out and out, to
live like an artist, not to be troubled with the hindrances and petty
restrictions of an ordinary woman's life, which she was tempted to
despise, to which, if she yielded at all in her mother's house, it was
with scarcely concealed reluctance and aversion. Very likely she had
only the most one-sided conception of the life she would have chosen.
Certainly her notions of Bohemianism were about as ingenuous as "little
May's" might have been; to go where art called her, to do what art
demanded of her, to be art's humble, diligent, faithful servant all her
days, without being held back and fettered on every hand by set meals,
obtrusive servants, changes of dress, the obligation to pay and receive
visits. The dream of her life was to get to Paris and have lessons in
one of the French studios, where she was led to believe women have as
good a chance of being well taught as men possess. She would prefer to
live with some young women students like herself _en fille_--a
modified--much modified version of _en garcon_. They would hire an
_etage_ in some cheap, convenient quarter, get the wife or daughter of
the _conciergerie_ to prepare breakfast and supper for them, dine at one
of Duval's restaurants work all day, and sleep the sleep of the
labouring woman at night. She said she knew quite well how such artists
were considered in Paris, that they were regarded as _vauriennes_, to
whom there was no occasion to pay the respect and consideration which
were reserved for the potent _mesdames_ and the _jeunes filles ingenues_
of society. But what had she to do with society? She belonged to the
great republic of art, and had infinite