In this process Ludlow discovered that there was more of the Fine Arts
Department than he had supposed at first. He was aware of some women
who had come into the next aisle or section, and presently he overheard
fragments of their talk.
A girl's voice said passionately: "I don't care! I shan't leave them
here for folks to make remarks about! I knew they wouldn't take the
premium, and I hope you're satisfied now, mother."
"Well, you're a very silly child," came in an older voice, suggestive
of patience and amiability. "Don't tear them, anyway!"
"I shall! I don't care if I tear them all to pieces."
There was a sound of quick steps, and of the angry swirl of skirts, and
the crackling and rending of paper.
"There, now!" said the older voice. "You've dropped one."
"I don't care! I hope they'll trample it under their great stupid
hoofs."
The paper, whatever it was, came skating out under the draped tabling
in the section where Ludlow stood, arrested in his sad employment by
the unseen drama, and lay at his feet. He picked it up, and he had only
time to glance at it before he found himself confronted by a fiercely
tearful young girl who came round the corner of his section, and
suddenly stopped at sight of him. With one hand she pressed some
crumpled sheets of paper against, her breast; the other she stretched
toward Ludlow.
"Oh! will you----" she began, and then she faltered; and as she turned
her little head aside for a backward look over her shoulder, she made
him, somehow, think of a hollyhock, by the tilt of her tall, slim,
young figure, and by the colors of her hat from which her face
flowered; no doubt the deep-crimson silk waist she wore, with its
petal-edged ruffle flying free down her breast, had something to do
with his fantastic notion. She was a brunette, with the lightness and
delicacy that commonly go with the beauty of a blonde. She could not
have been more than fifteen; her skirts had not yet matured to the full
womanly length; she was still a child.
A handsome, mild, middle-aged woman appeared beside the stormy young
thing, and said in the voice which Ludlow had already heard, "Well,
Cornelia!" She seemed to make more account than the girl made of the
young fellow's looks. He was of the medium height for a man, but he was
so slight that he seemed of lower stature, and he eked out an effect of
distinction by brushing his little moustache up sharply at the corners
in a fashion he had learned in France, and by wearing a little black
dot of an imperial. His brow was habitually darkened by a careworn
frown, which came from deep and anxious thinking about the principles
and the practice of art. He was very well dressed, and he carried
himself with a sort of worldly splendor which did not intimidate the
lady before him. In the country women have no more apprehension of men
who are young and stylish and good-looking than they have in the city;
they rather like them to be so, and meet them with confidence in any
casual encounter.
The lady said, "Oh, thank you," as Ludlow came up to the girl with the
paper, and then she laughed with no particular intention, and said,
"It's one of my daughter's drawings."
"Oh, indeed!" said Ludlow, with a quick perception of the mother's
pride in it, and of all the potentialities of prompt intimacy. "It's
very good."
"Well, _I_ think so," said the lady, while the girl darkled and bridled
in young helplessness. If she knew that her mother ought not to be
offering a stranger her confidence like that, she did not know what to
do about it. "She was just going to take them home," said the mother
vaguely.
"I'm sorry," said Ludlow. "I seem to be a day after the fair, as far as
they're concerned."
"Well, I don't know," said the mother, with the same amiable vagueness.
She had some teeth gone, and when she smiled she tried to hide their
absence on the side next Ludlow; but as she was always smiling she did
not succeed perfectly. She looked doubtfully at her daughter, in the
manner of mothers whom no severity of snubbing can teach that their
daughters when well-grown girls can no longer be treated as infants. "I
don't know as you'd think you had lost much. We didn't expect they
_would_ take the premium, a _great_ deal."
"I should hope not," said Ludlow. "The competition was bad enough."
The mother seemed to divine a compliment in this indefinite speech. She
said: "Well, I don't see myself why they didn't take it."
"There was probably no one to feel how much better they were," said
Ludlow.
"Well, that's what _I_ think," said the mother, "and it's what I tell
her." She stood looking from Ludlow to her daughter and back, and now
she ventured, seeing him so intent on the sketch he still held, "You an
artist?"
"A student of art," said Ludlow, with the effect of uncovering himself
in a presence.
The mother did not know what to make of it apparently; she said
blankly, "Oh!" and then added impressively, to her daughter: "Why don't
you show them to him, Cornelia?"
"I should think it a great favor," said Ludlow, intending to be
profoundly respectful. But he must have overdone it. The girl
majestically gave her drawings to her mother, and marched out of the
aisle.
Ludlow ignored her behavior, as if it had nothing to do with the
question, and began to look at the drawings, one after another, with
various inarticulate notes of comment imitated from a great French
master, and with various foreign phrases, such as "_Bon! Bon! Pas
mauvais! Joli! Chic!_" He seemed to waken from them to a consciousness
of the mother, and returned to English. "They are very interesting. Has
she had instruction?"
"Only in the High School, here. And she didn't seem to care any for
that. She seems to want to work more by herself."
"That's wrong," said Ludlow, "though she's probably right about the
High School."