Betty only heeded the first part of his sentence.
"Who won't let you?" she asked, standing on one leg as she put the question.
"My people," said John. "They don't want me to be an artist."
Betty's eyes rounded themselves.
"Are you going to be an artist?" she asked. She was intensely interested. The boys who played in her kingdom had not arrived at the stage of thinking what they were going to be. What they were was all-sufficient unto them. Cyril had once declared his intention of keeping a sweets' shop, but that was quite a year ago now.
Betty had read many stories about artists, and they were always set in romantic or tragic circumstances. The look she gave to the one before her warmed him into becoming confidential on the spot. He did not tell her all at once, not all even that first afternoon, although they took the homeward way together.
But he gave her a rough outline of the lives of several artists who had sprung from the ranks, and of one in particular who lived in a cellar, and tasted of starvation as a boy; one who, denied paper, could not yet deny the genius within him, but drew in coloured chalks upon any vacant wall that came in his way. And he always drew animals—and usually horses and dogs.
The little brown face under the sun-bonnet glowed with delight. Never in all her life had the imaginative small maiden come across a boy like this. Big John Brown, indeed! Bully, indeed! Gardener's boy, indeed! How could she and Cyril ever have said, ever have thought, such things?
Presently, for the boy had never had such a listener in his life before, he told her of other men—Stephenson, Newton, Shakespeare—and Betty took off her bonnet as her earnestness increased, and tucked it under her arm after a way she had when agitated.
"Oh, I wish I was a boy," she said. "What's the good of a girl? What can a girl do? Don't you know anything about self-made women?"