It had begun ten years ago in the Life Class at the Girls’ Institute of Practical Art where Miss Julie, bravely disregarding her thirty-five years, had commenced to study. Upon the death of their very old father, the three Humberts, brother and two sisters, had left their farm in Maine and had come to New York to live. They were independent now, and in a hurry to leave their old homestead, to be free from that atmosphere, where they had passed a dreary childhood and a youth frightfully oppressed by the old man. Crude, strong people, they were possessed of a strange and pitiful craving for “culture.” Perhaps because they were rather too old and too repressed for pleasure.
Mr. Humbert had found a position in an office, fulfilling a lifelong dream of gentility, and his great hands, worn and roughened with the hard labour of the farm, seized eagerly upon the pen. He had made himself into the likeness of a scholar, without learning, without aptitude; he had covered himself with the shell of a scholar, and he deceived himself and his sisters and all the rest of their little world. Miss Amy had found it hardest to adapt herself. She was by nature the perfect village gossip, the meddlesome and vindictive spinster inflicted upon every community in all corners of this earth. She was cruel, jealous and stupid. Left to herself she had been unable to discover in all the city anything which really interested her. But a casual neighbour had taken her in hand, and under her direction she developed strangely. She became absorbed in Interior Decorating. She had not a vestige of taste; she never dreamt of applying at home any of the principles of which she read, but she dearly loved to see pictures and to read about fine old furniture, about rugs, about Antiques. She used to go to Auction Sales with great pleasure. Also, with mysterious facility, she made a number of friends. In the stores, the markets, in the street cars, she would drop into conversation with strangers, and she would never let them go. She managed so that within a year’s time she was able to go out somewhere nearly every day.
Miss Julie, as we said, began at once to study art, with rapture. No one could imagine how she enjoyed that Life Class—a most refined and earnest class, thoroughly feminine, and inclined to fussiness. There were only twelve members and five of them had scholarships of which they were doggedly determined to take advantage. They came early, so as not to waste a minute, and they carried out every minute suggestion of the teacher. The models were all investigated, and a good reputation was of more avail than a fine body. Respectable women, generally a trifle heavy, “picturesque” old men with white beards, a young man or so who was invariably struggling to study something, and was not to be discouraged by posing all day and amusing himself all evening.
The class was on this particular morning assembled, all ready, sitting before their drawing boards, and a little indignant at the delay. They couldn’t bear to waste time.
“Ten minutes late!” said one of them. “It’s to be a child to-day, isn’t it, Miss Humbert?”
Miss Julie, as monitor, was informed and answered yes.
“I don’t care about doing children,” said the student, “I don’t think they’re interesting. That last little boy was perfectly square.”
Just then in came a fat, smiling woman in black, holding a little girl by the hand. Miss Julie pointed out the dressing screen, and they disappeared behind it. For an unreasonably long time their voices were heard, whispering.
It was Miss Julie who voiced the indignation of the serious class.
“Aren’t you ready to pose yet?” she called out. “We’ve wasted over twenty minutes.”