She glanced at him in surprise. The few references she had heard made to Elisha Cook—Foster Townsend had made them—were far from classifying him as a “good fellow.”
“Is he!” she exclaimed, involuntarily. “Why, I thought—”
She paused. He nodded.
“You bet he is!” he vowed. “He has been mighty good to me and to lots of others. He doesn’t understand, that’s all. You are lucky, Esther. Your uncle does understand, or seems to. He was willing for you to go on with your singing.”
Her agreement was but partial. “Ye-s,” she said. “Yes, he does understand, in a way. He likes to hear me sing and he helps me to study because it pleases me to do it, you know. Why, the other day I said something about how marvelous it must be to sing in opera. I wish you could have heard him. The things he said about opera and those who sing in it were—well, they were what Nabby Gifford would have called ‘blasphemious.’”
Bob laughed at the word, but he was too much in earnest to laugh long.
“There you are!” he exclaimed. “That’s it. They don’t understand, either of them. They are like all old people, they belong back in another generation.” He spoke as if Elisha Cook and Foster Townsend were nonogenarians. “Granddad—yes, and your uncle, too, I suppose,” he went on, “were brought up to think that nothing counted but business, buying and selling and getting ahead of the other fellow in a trade, all that sort of stuff. Art and music and—and the rest of it they don’t see at all. Well, I do. I don’t want to be a business man. I want to paint. And I am going to paint. I’ll never be a Rembrandt maybe, but I am making a little progress, so my teachers say, and I’m going to stick at it. Some of these days I shall go to Paris, where the big fellows are. That’s the place—Paris!”
She gasped with excitement.
“Oh!” she cried. “Are you going to Paris? I am going there, myself, sometime, to study.”
“You are! Bully! We can see each other over there, can’t we?”