“You mean the teaching?”
“I do. It’s a dog’s work.”
She rose and faced me, sullen as a thunder-cloud.
“But you’ve hardly tried it.”
“I’ve tried it enough. There are plenty of women who can scratch along that way and be thankful to Providence and pleasant to the pupils. Let them do it. It’s their work, not mine.”
She turned from me and went to the window, but not this time to drum on the pane. Leaning against the frame she looked out on the tin roof. The angry contempt of her face suggested that the millionaires Betty was collecting were gathered there, unable to escape, and forced to hear how low they stood in the opinion of their hireling.
“I am an artist. Those people,” she made a grandiose gesture to the tin roof, “don’t know what an artist is. They think they’re condescending, doing a kindness. I’m the one that’s condescending—I do them not a kindness but an honor, when I enter their houses and listen to the squawking of their barbarous children.”
“You can’t expect them to think that.”
“I don’t, they haven’t got sense enough. That woman, the mother, came in while I was there. I’ve no doubt she thought she was being very agreeable. She asked me questions about my method.” She gave me a sidelong cast of her eye full of derision. “I sat and listened, and when she was done I said I didn’t discuss my method with people who knew nothing.”
“Oh, Lizzie,” I groaned. “You didn’t say that?”