"Well, you said my cousin was a conductor on the Lake Shore—you knew perfectly well it was the Michigan Central!"
I apologized.
It had been two years since I had seen this woman, and not a letter had passed between us. I had sent her a book now and then, and she had sent me a sketch or two.
White Pigeon knows nothing about me, and never asked concerning my history, which is a blank, my lord! Does the lily inquire of the humming-bird, "Hast hummed and fluttered about other flowers?"
That is a charming friendship that asks nothing, makes no demands, needs no assurances, never falters, and is so frank that it disarms prudery and pretense.
I said as much.
White Pigeon made no answer, but flung a pebble into the lake.
And all I know of White Pigeon is that she was born in White Pigeon, Michigan, and had left there ten years before to study art for a short time in Paris. The short time extended to ten years.
White Pigeon does not call herself an artist—she only copies pictures in the Louvre and gives lessons. "Not being able to paint, I give lessons," she once said to me. The first pictures she copied were sold to kind gentlemen who make many wagons at South Bend, Indiana; other pictures went to men who have interests at Ivorydale; and some have gone to the mill-owner at Ypsilanti, for the mill-owner is interested in art, as all patrons of the "Hum Journal" know.
White Pigeon lived at Paris because one must needs live somewhere, and rich Americans sometimes send her their daughters to "finish." That was what took her over to the Lake District—she was traveling with two young women from Grand Rapids. And so these three women were doing Great Britain, and White Pigeon was acting as courier, chaperone and instructor.