“She is so sweet and good always—bright and full of fun, and so useful in the house. I am so anxious about her; I think she has been out too much last winter, dancing too much, and keeping late hours, but I had not the heart to refuse her anything. You had such a sad childhood, Jenny—I know you missed the company of other children, and I was sure you and papa would think it right to let the child have all the pleasure she could.” She sighed. “My poor little girls, they have nothing to look forward to but work and privations. What am I to do if they get ill besides? I can do so little.”
Jenny bent over her mother and kissed the tears from her pretty, childish eyes. The longing to give and to receive tenderness, the remembrance of her early childhood, and the consciousness that her mother did not know her life—its sorrows before and its happiness now—melted into a feeling of protecting love, and she gathered her mother into her arms.
“Don’t cry, mother dear. Everything will come all right. I am going to stay at home for the present, and we have still something left of Aunt Katherine’s money.”
“No, Jenny, you must keep that for yourself. I understand now that you must not be hampered in any way in your work. It was such a joy to us all when your picture at the exhibition was sold last autumn.”
Jenny smiled. The fact that she had sold a picture and had two or three lines in the papers about it made her people look upon her work in quite a different light.
“Don’t worry about me, mother. It is all right. I may be able to earn something while I am here. I must have a studio, though,” she said, after a pause, adding as an explanation: “I must finish my pictures in a studio, you see.”
“But you will live at home, won’t you?” asked the mother anxiously.
Jenny did not answer.
“It won’t do, my dear child, for a young girl to live alone in a studio.”
“Very well,” said Jenny; “I shall live at home.”