“Artful Madge” was the very flippant name by which Madge Burtwell’s brother Ned had persisted in calling her from the time when, at the age of sixteen, she gained reluctant permission to become a student at the Art School.
“Not that we have any objection to art,” Mrs. Burtwell was wont to explain in a deprecatory tone; “only we should have preferred to have Madge graduate first, before devoting herself to a mere accomplishment. It seems a little like putting the trimming on a dress before sewing the seams up,” she would add; “I did it once when I was a girl, and the dress always had a queer look.”
But Mrs. Burtwell, though firm in her 66 own opinions, was something of a philosopher in her attitude toward the contrary-minded, and even where her own children were concerned she never allowed her influence to degenerate into tyranny. When she found Madge, at the age of sixteen, more eager than ever before to study art, and nothing else, she told her husband that they might as well make up their minds to it, and, at the word, their minds were made up. For Mr. Burtwell was the one entirely and unreasoningly tractable member of Mrs. Burtwell’s flock; in explanation of which fact he was careful to point out that only a mature mind could appreciate the true worth of Mrs. Burtwell’s judgment.
The Burtwells were people of small means and of correspondingly modest requirements. They lived in an unfashionable quarter of the city, kept a maid-of-all-work, sent their children to the public schools, and got their books from the Public Library. Having no expensive tastes, they regarded themselves as well-to-do and envied no one. 67
If Madge Burtwell’s eyes had been a whit less clear, or her nature a thought less guileless, Ned would not have been so enchanted with his new name for her. Indeed, a few years ago she had been described by an only half-appreciative friend as “a splendid girl without a mite of tact,” and if she had succeeded in somewhat softening the asperity of her natural frankness, there was enough of it left to lend a delicate shade of humour to the name.
Artful Madge, then, was a student at the Art School, and a very promising one at that. At the end of three years she had made such good progress that she was promoted to painting in the Portrait Class, and since her special friend and crony, Eleanor Merritt, was also a member of that class, Madge considered her cup of happiness full. Not that there were not visions in plenty of still better things to come, but they seemed so far in the future that they hardly took on any relation with the actual present. Madge and Eleanor dreamed of Europe, of the old masters 68 and of the great Paris studios, but it is a question whether the fulfillment of any dream could have made them happier than they were to-day. Certain it is, that, as they stood side by side in the great barren studio, clad in their much-bedaubed, long-sleeved aprons, and working away at a portrait head, they had little thought for anything but the task in hand. The one vital matter for the moment was the mixing and applying of their colours, and, in their eagerness to reproduce the exact contour of a cheek, or the precise shadow of an unbeautiful nose, they would hardly have transferred their attention from the most ill-favoured model to the last and greatest Whistler masterpiece.
The girls at the Art School had got hold of Ned’s name for his sister and adopted it with enthusiasm.
“If you want to know the truth, ask Artful Madge,” was a very common saying among them.
“Artful Madge says it’s a good likeness, anyhow!” modest little Minnie Drayton would maintain, when hard 69 pressed by the teasing of the older girls.
The incongruity of the name seemed somehow to throw into brighter relief the peculiar sincerity of its bearer’s character, and by the time it was generally adopted among the students Madge Burtwell’s popularity was established.