II
Miss Julie had always encouraged Rosaleen’s fondness for drawing. In fact, it may have been the drawing lessons she had given the little girl and her fervent talk of “art” which had given Rosaleen the idea of becoming an artist. But, whether the ambition was implanted by nature or by Miss Julie, the ability was born with her. She had an undoubted facility. In the long hours she had spent alone in the flat, she had comforted herself with her little talent, copying the covers of magazines and inventing romances around the imbecile beauties. And as time went on, and her companions at school admired her work, her pride and her hope increased. She saw in this career as an artist a chance of escape, for freedom.
When she was graduated from the High School, at eighteen, she said that she should like to study art seriously. Miss Amy had agreed at once, and Rosaleen had then showed her an advertisement in the Sunday paper which she had noticed for some weeks.
European Art Teacher would accept one or two more young lady pupils. Very moderate terms. Address F. W.
They had addressed F. W., and in the due course of time received a letter signed “Faith Waters,” inviting them to call the next afternoon at four. They had discovered the European Art Teacher living in a dark, old-fashioned flat on Tenth Street, with one light room at the back which she had made into a studio by filling it with plaster casts on crooked shelves put up by her own hands. The teacher herself was a withered little woman in a crushed and dusty brown dress, with a black velvet bow in her cottony white hair, and she had the cultured voice of one who has been to Europe.
Rosaleen looked about at the photographs on the walls of various persons in stage costume, signed A ma chère Miss—Bien à vous—and so on. She supposed that these were artistic foreign friends of Miss Waters’, never suspecting that they were nothing more nor less than second rate stage people to whom she had taught English.
“I suppose you’ve lived abroad a long time?” said Miss Amy.
“Oh, dear me, yes!” said Miss Waters. “I studied in Brussels for years!”
She didn’t explain that this had been thirty years ago, and in a cheap pension de demoiselles, and that she had never seen the inside of a foreign art school, or studied under any master except the miserable old man who had taught drawing as an extra to the demoiselles.
“I’ll show you some of my work,” she had said. “I haven’t a proper place to hang them here. The light is so bad you’ll hardly be able to judge.... But still....”