“My dear! That is one of the great lady artists of the age. She lectures to factory girls or something, and she paints limp females snuffling over tiger-lilies. Her ideal woman has that sort of droop of the throat—I imagine she-tries to teach it to the factory. She objects to backbone.”
Miss Mazerod, who possessed a very firm little specimen of the adjunct mentioned, drew herself up and smiled commiseratingly.
“Then,” said Dora, “I feel quite consoled about my sketches.”
For the first time Miss Mazerod looked serious.
“Dora,” she said, “I often wonder whether it would be profane to mention in one's prayers a little gratitude for not having an artistic soul. There are lots of women like that in the world, especially in London. They pretend that they think themselves superior to men, but they know in their hearts that they are inferior to women. For they have not something that women ought to have—No, Dolly, no brown studies here; you must not dream here!”
Dora, with a light laugh, came back from her mental wanderings to find herself looking at a face which caught her attention at once. It was the face of a man—brown, self-contained, with unhappy eyes and a long drooping nose.
“Who is that man?” she inquired at once. “Now, he is quite different from the rest. He is about the only person who is not furtively finding out how much attention he has succeeded in attracting.”
“Yes, that is a man with a purpose.”
“What purpose?” inquired Dora.
“I don't know; I shouldn't think any one knows.”