"I am glad to hear that."
"Well," said Meta, looking puzzled, "I should have thought, if a girl throws away a fortune for it, as Miss Desmond seems to have done, it ought to be her object in life, if it isn't."
"You don't quite understand," said Jean. "It was not for painting, so much as for liberty, that I left my grandfather."
"Ah," said Mrs. Fergusson, "liberty is the young people's god nowadays."
Jean fancied she saw reproach in her eyes.
"It doesn't sound nice," she admitted hastily, "but if you knew my circumstances you would understand better. I was becoming a vegetable; nothing more or less would have pleased my grandfather."
"How is little Sunnie?"
Mrs. Fergusson quietly ignored Jean's speech. It made her feel ashamed of protruding her own personality before a comparative stranger.
"She is not well to-day, poor mite! When I left her she was longing for her doctor."
Mrs. Fergusson smiled.