“You give me more trouble than a three-week’s-old baby,” Professor Waite had remarked to poor Milly, and Winnie had retorted spitefully, “I wish you had to take care of one—I guess you would find a difference.”
Winnie’s sauciness and Milly’s dulness, combined with that of many of his other pupils, drove the Professor to despair after a week’s trial. He told Madame, as I learned later, that he must give up the position, as her pupils were all “too hopelessly elementary.”
Madame was disappointed. Her art department had always been an attractive feature, and since the name of Professor Carrington Waite, late of the Académie des Beaux Arts, had appeared in her circulars, many had joined the school purely for the sake of the studio instruction. Madame explained this to the young artist.
He ran his fingers through his hair in despair. “Of what manner of use is it for me to remain?” he asked. “There is only one pupil sufficiently advanced to gain anything from my instruction, and that is Miss Smith. The others made as much advance, perhaps more, under her teaching as they have under mine.”
A happy thought came to Madame. “If I engage Miss Smith as your assistant, Professor Waite, perhaps she can translate your ideas into terms which will be intelligible by the students of lower intelligence or advancement, and possibly she can so enlighten some of them that they can profit later by your personal teaching.”
This plan struck Professor Waite as practicable. He now only visited the studio for an hour each morning, during which time he criticised the work which had been done under my supervision during the previous day. The new arrangement was an excellent one for me, for I profited by all his remarks, listening to them with the keenest attention, and thus received thirty lessons during the hour instead of one. As I had but three other studies, and these were in the senior class, it was possible for me to give the necessary time by preparing all of my lessons in the evening. It was unremitting, incessant work, but my health was excellent, and art was my supreme delight. Moreover, Madame had offered me a salary of three hundred dollars beyond my school expenses, and it was perfect joy to be able to relieve father of this burden. I had a high ambition to go abroad some day and study art in Paris, and I wished to save as much as possible of my salary toward this purpose. I had the lower compartment in the safe, and here I laid away every dollar that I could spare, limiting myself in everything but my subscription to the Home of the Elder Brother; but for this outlet I would have grown niggardly and avaricious. The same charity which made Winnie prudently retrench her propensity to lavish expenditure, and take thought carefully for the morrow, kept me from utter selfishness and penuriousness by keeping one channel of generous giving open and pulsing freely toward others.
Cynthia Vaughn’s affairs were kept closely to herself. We sometimes fancied that she pretended to greater wealth and consequence than she really possessed. Certainly, if the sums of which she frequently spoke of receiving were at her disposal she was a veritable miser; for her subscription to the Home was the smallest of any girl in the King’s Daughters’ Ten; the presents which she ostentatiously bestowed upon Adelaide and Milly were cheap though showy, as was her own clothing.
The treasures which she committed to the cabinet safe were carefully locked in a small japanned tin box, the key of which she kept in her pocket-book, and she was the only one of us whose belongings within the safe were so protected. We had perfect confidence in one another, and our funds lay open to the observation or handling of any one possessing the pass key in the match box. It is needless to say that up to the night of the robbery our security had been inviolate.