“But it is all we can pay. I told father I would not ask for more. Father said he knew it would take more, but I said I would give up Art first.”
“Oh, I say!” he protested.
“And to-morrow I am going to begin taking lessons, but I will not call on father for another cent. He shan’t be able to throw it in my face that it turned out as he said, and that I was wrong. When he and I dispute it always does turn out as he says—this time it shan’t.”
Archibald laughed a little. The poor fool, don’t you know, was so captivated that every word, every action of the girl was music to him. The two weeks of observation had told on her dress. To-night she wore a white muslin, elaborated with pretty ribbons. She no longer seemed especially rustic to him. He noticed that she was doing her hair now in the prevailing style. “By Jove!” he said to himself, “I’ll see that she comes out at the Patriarchs’ next winter!”
This was his highest earthly happiness for a débutante.
“I am going to make money,” she went on; “I’m going to paint vases, plates, odds and ends, pot-boilers, you know, and so father shan’t know what it costs.”
“Oh, by the way, if you do,” he pretended, lazily blowing out a ring of smoke, “I happen to know a fellow—an old friend of mine—who gives very fair prices for those sort of things. Now, I am sure he will take any gimcrack you may do.”
Somehow the word gimcrack displeased her.
“My Art work has always been thought very pretty in East Village,” she said. “It would never sell, but it was thought pretty. I used to long to help father—and our family is so large, you know, four little brothers and two sisters younger than I am—and now, if I only could get on, and help father! Oh, Mr. Archibald, you don’t know how little law there is to go round in East Village!” She heaved a deep sigh.