“It's pretty melancholy. The trouble is constant grinding work and bad food. I've been studying these people. The women are all—”
“Ugly,” suggested the artist.
“Well, ill-favored, scrimped; that means ill-nurtured simply. Out of the three hundred there are not half a dozen well-conditioned, filled out physically in comfortable proportions. Most of the women look as if they had been dragged out with indoor work and little intellectual life, but the real cause of physical degeneration is bad cooking. If they lived more out-of-doors, as women do in Italy, the food might not make so much difference, but in our climate it is the prime thing. This poor physical state accounts for the want of gayety and the lack of beauty. The men, on the whole, are better than the women, that is, the young men. I don't know as these people are overworked, as the world goes. I dare say, Nettie, there's not a girl in this crowd who could dance with you through a season. They need to be better fed, and to have more elevating recreations-something to educate their taste.”
“I've been educating the taste of one excursionist this morning, a good-faced workman, who was prying about everywhere with a curious air, and said he never'd been on an excursion before. He came up to me in the office, deferentially asked me if I would go into the parlor with him, and, pointing to something hanging on the wall, asked, 'What is that?' 'That,' I said, 'is a view from Sunset Rock, and a very good one.' 'Yes,' he continued, walking close up to it, 'but what is it?' 'Why, it's a painting.' 'Oh, it isn't the place?' 'No, no; it's a painting in oil, done with a brush on a piece of canvas—don't you see—, made to look like the view over there from the rock, colors and all.' 'Yes, I thought, perhaps—you can see a good ways in it. It's pooty.' 'There's another one,' I said—'falls, water coming down, and trees.' 'Well, I declare, so it is! And that's jest a make-believe? I s'pose I can go round and look?' 'Certainly.' And the old fellow tiptoed round the parlor, peering at all the pictures in a confused state of mind, and with a guilty look of enjoyment. It seems incredible that a person should attain his age with such freshness of mind. But I think he is the only one of the party who even looked at the paintings.”
“I think it's just pathetic,” said Miss Lamont. “Don't you, Mr. Forbes?”
“No; I think it's encouraging. It's a sign of an art appreciation in this country. That man will know a painting next time he sees one, and then he won't rest till he has bought a chromo, and so he will go on.”
“And if he lives long enough, he will buy one of Mr. Forbes's paintings.”
“But not the one that Miss Lamont is going to sit for.”
When Mr. King met the party at the dinner-table, the places of Miss Lamont and Mr. Forbes were still vacant. The other ladies looked significantly at them, and one of them said, “Don't you think there's something in it? don't you think they are interested in each other?” Mr. King put down his soup-spoon, too much amazed to reply. Do women never think of anything but mating people who happen to be thrown together? Here were this young lady and his friend, who had known each other for three days, perhaps, in the most casual way, and her friends had her already as good as married to him and off on a wedding journey. All that Mr. King said, after apparent deep cogitation, was, “I suppose if it were here it would have to be in a traveling-dress,” which the women thought frivolous.
