Half a dozen young victims of this malady met daily in one of the cells of a great art bee-hive called “Raphael’s Rooms,” and devoted their shining hours to modelling fancy heads, gossiping the while; for the poor things found the road to fame rather dull and dusty without such verbal sprinklings.
“Psyche Dean, you’ve had an adventure! I see it in your face; so tell it at once, for we are as stupid as owls here to-day,” cried one of the sisterhood, as a bright-eyed girl entered with some precipitation.
“I dropped my portfolio, and a man picked it up, that’s all,” replied Psyche, hurrying on her gray linen pinafore.
“That won’t do; I know something interesting happened, for you’ve been blushing, and you look brisker than usual this morning,” said the first speaker, polishing off the massive nose of her Homer.
“It wasn’t anything,” began Pysche a little reluctantly. “I was coming up in a hurry when I ran against a man coming down in a hurry. My portfolio slipped, and my papers went flying all about the landing. Of course we both laughed and begged pardon, and I began to pick them up, but he wouldn’t let me; so I held the book while he collected the sketches. I saw him glance at them as he did so, and that made me blush, for they are wretched things, you know.”
“Not a bit of it; they are capital, and you are a regular genius, as we all agree,” cut in the Homeric Miss Cutter.
“Never tell people they are geniuses unless you wish to spoil them,” returned Psyche severely. “Well, when the portfolio was put to rights I was going on, but he fell to picking up a little bunch of violets I had dropped; you know I always wear a posy into town to give me inspiration. I didn’t care for the dusty flowers, and told him so, and hurried away before any one came. At the top of the stairs I peeped over the railing, and there he was, gathering up every one of those half-dead violets as carefully as if they had been tea-roses.”
“Psyche Dean, you have met your fate this day!” exclaimed a third damsel, with straw-colored tresses, and a good deal of weedy shrubbery in her hat, which gave an Ophelia-like expression to her sentimental countenance.
Psyche frowned and shook her head, as if half sorry she had told her little story.
“Was he handsome?” asked Miss Larkins, the believer in fate.