Ludlow found his friend Burton smoking on his porch when he came back
from the fair, and watching with half-shut eyes the dust that overhung
the street. Some of the farmers were already beginning to drive home,
and their wheels sent up the pulverous clouds which the western sun
just tinged with red; Burton got the color under the lower boughs of
the maple grove of his deep door-yard.
"Well," he called out, in a voice expressive of the temperament which
kept him content with his modest fortune and his village circumstance,
when he might have made so much more and spent so much more in the
world outside, "did you get your picture?"
Ludlow was only half-way up the walk from the street when the question
met him, and he waited to reach the piazza steps before he answered.
"Oh, yes, I think I've got it." By this time Mrs. Burton had appeared
at the hall door-way, and stood as if to let him decide whether he
would come into the house, or join her husband outside. He turned aside
to take a chair near Burton's, tilted against the wall, but he
addressed himself to her.
"Mrs. Burton, who is rather a long-strung, easy-going, good-looking,
middle-aged lady, with a daughter about fifteen years old, extremely
pretty and rather peppery, who draws?"
Mrs. Burton at once came out, and sat sidewise in the hammock, facing
the two men.
"How were they dressed?"
Ludlow told as well as he could; he reserved his fancy of the girl's
being like a hollyhock.
"Was the daughter pretty?"
"Very pretty."
"Dark?"
"Yes, 'all that's best of dark and bright.'"
"Were they both very graceful?"
"Very graceful indeed."
"Why it must be Mrs. Saunders. Where did you see them?"
"In the Art Department."
"Yes. She came to ask me whether I would exhibit some of Cornelia's
drawings, if I were she."
"And you told her you would?" her husband asked, taking his pipe out
for the purpose.
"Of course I did. That was what she wished me to tell her."