“Why, Bonny! One would think you had all the responsibility of this undertaking, to hear you talk! Isn’t my mother to have a word of influence, miss?”
“She is to have all the words she wants, but none of the work that I can help. Well, I don’t mean that exactly; but wait, and I’ll tell you what I do mean. Now, trot!”
Thus dismissed, Isabelle joined her brother in the garden. To her, at present, it seemed but a patch of muddy ground, though to the natural gardener who was to labor in it, it already presented a picture of thrift and greenness. “Think of it, Isabelle Beckwith! A week ago we had not a fraction of an acre over which to rule, now we have ten whole ones! I’m like Motherkin, as rich as Crœsus!”
“I’m afraid we shall get so sick of it. And we have cut loose now from so much that it would be hard to get back into even the old, modest places we held in the city. One never steps down for a moment but somebody else steps up into one’s place. As soon as I told the principal of our school that I would have to resign mine, she appointed somebody else at once. I could not get back the position if I would.”
“You must not look backward, Belle. We have done what seems the best for all, what certainly will be the best for our mother’s health, and that should cover all regrets. Besides, I am sure we shall succeed,—in making a living, at least. That is all we could have hoped to do if we had stayed in town.”
“I don’t know. Nobody can guess how I hated to give up my art class! The Professor said I would certainly make a name for myself if I kept on.”
“Why, Belle! I did not dream you felt so blue about this change! And I should like to know what is to hinder your ‘making a name’ for yourself here as well as there? Don’t all the artists, the landscape ones anyway, go into the country to study? And as for portraits, where can you find more original models than along these country lanes? If you have enough rudimentary knowledge, and talent, to make your teacher express himself like that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself if you can’t conquer the rest!”
“H’m-m. Since when did you become philosopher?”
“No matter. You have always laughed at my ‘poetical talent;’ Bonny has not. But I tell you that if there is any real poetry in me, so real that it must find expression, it will find it here just as certainly as if I were to spend my days in study and all my evenings scribbling verses.”
“Then you disparage education?”