“Why the teaching? I thought your pictures sold well.”
“And so they do, often; but I took up the teaching some years ago, before I had any hope of selling my pictures; it is very sure, very well paid, and I really find it a rest after five hours of studio work; after five hours I don’t feel a picture any longer.”
“Yet they must know that the money comes from somewhere?”
Hilda’s voice in replying held a pained quality; this attack on her family very evidently perplexed her.
“Mamma thinks it comes from papa, and papa, I suppose, doesn’t think about it at all; he knows, too, that I sell my pictures. You mustn’t imagine,” she added, with a touch of pride and resentment, “that they would let me teach if they knew; you mustn’t imagine that for one moment. And I don’t mean to let them know, for then I couldn’t help them; as it is, my help is limited. The money goes, for the most part, towards guarding mamma. She could not bear shocks and anxiety.”
Odd said nothing for some moments.
“How did it begin? how did you come to think of it?” he asked.
“It began some years ago, at the studio where I worked when I first came to Paris. There was a kind, dull French girl there; she had no talent, and she was very rich. She heard my work praised a good deal, and one day, after I had got a picture into the Salon for the first time, she came and asked me if I would give her lessons. Fifteen francs an hour.” Hilda paused in a way which showed Odd that the recollection was painful to her.
“It seemed a very strange thing to me at first, that she should ask me. I had, I’m afraid, rather silly ideas about Katherine and myself; as though we were very elevated young persons, above all the unpleasant realities of life. But my common sense soon got the better of my pride; or rather, I should say, the false pride made way for the honest. We were awfully poor just then. Papa, of course, never could, never even tried to make money; but that winter he went in for exasperated speculation, and really Katherine and I did not know what was to become of us. To keep it from mamma was the great thing. Katherine was just beginning to go out, and no money for gowns and cabs; no money, even, for mamma’s books. Keeping up with current literature is expensive, you know, and mamma has a horror of circulating libraries. The thought of poor mamma’s empty life soon decided me. I remember she had asked one day for John Addington Symonds’s last book, and Katherine and I looked at one another, knowing that it could not be bought. I realized then, that at all events I could make enough to keep mamma in books and Katherine in gloves. You can’t think how nasty, how egotistic my vulgar hesitation seemed to me. My life so full, so happy, and theirs on the verge of ruin. There is something very selfish about art, you know; it shuts one off so much from real life, makes one so indifferent to scrapings and pinchings. I realized that, with my shabby clothes and apparent talent, it was most natural for the French girl to think I should be glad of her offer; and indeed I was. It was soothing, too, to have her so eager. She wanted me very much, so I yielded gracefully.” Hilda gave a little smile of self-mockery. “I have taught her ever since. She lives in that house in the Rue d’Assas; rich, bourgeois people, common, but kind. She has no talent”—Hilda’s matter-of-fact manner of knowledge was really impressive—“but I don’t feel unfair in going on with her, for she really does see things now, and that is the greatest pleasure next to seeing and accomplishing; and, indeed, how rarely one accomplishes. Through her I have a great many pupils, for other girls at the studio heard of her progress with me, and wanted private lessons too. All my afternoons are taken up, and, with fifteen francs an hour, you can see what a lot I make. It rather annoys me to think of people far cleverer than I am who can make nothing, and I, just because I have had luck, making so much. But among my pupils, I really have quite a vogue; and I am a good teacher, I really think I am.”
“I am sure your pupils are very lucky. You have a great many, you say?”