It was well that Madge was a favourite, for in certain respects she was the worst sinner in the class. To begin with, her palette was the very largest in the room, and the most plentifully besmeared with colours, and woe to the girl who ventured too near it! As Madge stood before her easel, tall and fair and earnest, painting with an ardour and concentration which was all too sure to beguile her into her besetting sin of “exaggerating details,” she wielded both brush- and palette-arm with a genial disregard of consequences. Nor could one count upon her confining her activities to one location. Like all the students, she was in the habit of backing away from her natural anchorage from time to time, the better to judge of her 70 work, and not one of them all had such a fatal tendency to come up against an unoffending easel in the rear, sending canvas and paint-tubes rattling upon the floor.
Instantly she would drop upon her knees, overcome with contrition, and help collect the scattered treasures, giving many a jar or joggle to neighbouring easels in the process.
“It’s a shame, Miss Folsom!” she would cry, struggling to her feet again, still clutching her beloved palette, which seemed fairly to rain colours on every surrounding object. “It’s a shame! But if you will just cast your eye upon that thing of mine, you will perceive that it was the recklessness of desperation. Look at it! There’s not a value in it!”
Artful Madge was always forgiven, and no one ever thought of calling her awkward, and when, in the early autumn, a Saturday sketching club was organised, it was christened “The Artful Daubers” in honor of Madge, and she was unanimously elected president.
The girls were not in the habit of paying 71 much attention to chance visitors who came in from time to time and made the perilous passage among the easels, and lucky was the “parent” or “art-patron” who escaped without a streak of colour on some portion of his raiment. When Mrs. Oliver Jacques looked in upon them one memorable morning in February no premonition of great things to come stirred the company; only indifferent glances were directed upon her by the few who deigned to observe her at all. And this pleased Mrs. Oliver Jacques very much indeed.
Yet, if the girls had paused to consider,—a thing which they never did when there was a model on the platform,—they would have been aware that their visitor was a person of importance in the world of Art, for importance in no other world would have secured to her the personal escort of Mr. Salome, the adored teacher of their class. Yet Mrs. Jacques was a charming little old lady who would have commanded attention on her own merits in any less preoccupied assembly than 72 that of the studio. Her exceedingly bright eyes and her exceedingly white hair seemed to accentuate her animation of manner; there was so much sparkle in her face that even her silence did not lack point.
She had accomplished her tortuous passage among the easels without meeting with any mishaps in the shape of Cremnitz-white or crimson-lake. She had paused occasionally and had bestowed a critical nod upon the one “blocked-in” countenance, or had drawn her brows together questioningly over a study in which the nose had a startlingly finished appearance in a still sketchy environment, but not until she had successfully avoided the last easel, planted at an erratic angle just where the unwary would be sure to stub his toe, did she make any remark.
“A lot of them, aren’t there?” she observed.
“Yes, the school is pretty full,” Mr. Salome replied. “In fact, we’re a little bothered for room.”