I’ll follow day into the west;
Nor pause, nor heed, till I behold
The happy, happy Hills of Rest.
Jean was thinking of their talk as she sat out in the orchard today, trying to catch some of the fleeting beauty of its blossom laden trees. It was an accepted fact now, her trip abroad with Mrs. Newell, and they planned to sail the first week in September, so as to catch the Fall Academy and Exhibitions, all the way from London south to Rome. A letter from Bab had told her of the Phelps boy’s success; after fighting for it a year he had taken the Prix de Rome. This would give him a residence abroad, three years with all expenses paid, full art tuition and one thousand dollars in cash. Babbie had written:
“I am teasing Mother to trot over there once again, and am pretty sure she will have to give in. The poor old dear, if only she would be contented to let me ramble around with Hedda, we would be absolutely safe, but she always acts as if she were the goose who had not only laid a golden egg, but had hatched it. And behold me as the resultant genius. Anyway we’ll all hope to meet you down at Campodino. I hear the Contessa’s villa there is perfectly wonderful. Mother says it’s just exactly like the one that Browning rented during his honeymoon. He tells about it in ‘DeGustibus.’ I believe most of the rooms have been Americanized since the Contessa married Carlota’s father, and you don’t have to go down to the seashore when you want to take a bath. But the walls are lovely and crumbly with plenty of old lizards running in and out of the mold. I envy you like sixty. I wish I had a Contessa to tuck me under her wing like that.”
“How are you getting along, girlie?” asked a well known voice behind her.
“I don’t know, Dad,” said Jean, leaning back with her head on one side, looking for all the world, as Kit would have said, like a meditative brown thrush. “I can’t seem to get that queer silver gray effect. You take a day like this, just before a rain, and it seems to underlie everything. I’ve tried dark green and gray and sienna, and it doesn’t do a bit of good.”
“Mix a little Chinese black with every color you use,” said her father, closing one eye to look at her painting. “It is the old masters’ trick. You’ll find it in the Flemish school, and the Veronese. It gives you the atmospheric gray quality in everything. Hello, here come Ralph and Piney.”
Piney waved her hand in salutation, but joined Kit and Helen in the lower garden at their grubbing for cut worms.