She had begun to draw again, having changed her mind about the value of art since she had sacrificed her Mother Goose drawings through fear that drawing would lead to “worser” things, such as smoking and like evils.
She had taken drawing lessons at the Academy, of Herr Barmfeld, who came once a week from the little city near by on the river, which was growing like a mushroom, and sending little sympathetic thrills of new life into stolid, steady-going, old Palmyra.
The lessons had disturbed her very much at first. There was so much to undo and unlearn of her own work and ways that she was bewildered. She confided in Octavia and me at last. I suspected that she had been drawing and drawing and never letting us know it, but Octavia was altogether surprised.
Octavia was still teaching, varying the monotonous routine by furtive little ambitions in the way of story-writing. The stories came back to her with curt notes, or kind notes, or no notes at all, from the editors who received them. The only unvarying part of the performance was that they came back. I had grown to hate the sight of the packages in our box at the post-office. I always espied them through the window before I went in, and they gave me a dreadful pang, for Octavia’s sensitive face changed so when she received them and I laid to them the cruel little crow’s feet that were pinching the corners of her eyes.
We had all been seized with the desire to help on the family fortunes, for with all the new activities that the little growing city neighbor had aroused in Palmyra, shipbuilding did not flourish as in the olden times. Some people doubted whether it ever would flourish in our State again.
It seemed to me, sometimes, that Cyrus was wasting his life in a dreary round of unproductive drudgery. And Octavia, who had remarked to me, wistfully, long before we sent Dave to college, that nowadays, women—bright women—could do so many things, poor Octavia’s stories had all been returned to her. Her courage had always mounted again after defeat, and a long story was now growing slowly, and laboriously, under her pen. I, alone, was in her confidence and knew that “Evelyn Marchmont” was expected to make the family fortunes.
When Estelle also confided in me and showed me her portfolio full of drawings, I straightway marched her into Octavia’s room with it. I was still the domestic one; sage cheese and home-made preserves were the weapons with which I defied fate and I knew that I was not a judge of drawings.
Octavia was, perhaps, not much more so, but it seemed to me appropriate that the author of “Evelyn Marchmont” should criticise them rather than the maker of sage cheese. For myself I found them different from the drawings of other Academy girls, vaguely different from anything I had ever seen. The people were more like real people, and all the scenes were homely ones. I felt that the people ought, maybe, to look more picturesque than ordinary, and certainly have more conventional settings. I was afraid they were pretty bad. And how to save my conscience and Estelle’s feelings at the same time was a perplexing problem. I solved it like a coward by saying nothing and drawing her, portfolio and all, into Octavia’s room.
It was Saturday, a school holiday, and Octavia was at work on “Evelyn,” which she thrust hastily out of sight. She looked dubiously at the drawings. I could see that she felt my misgivings, and more. She said they were very pretty, and that was a wonderful likeness of Deacon Snow when he fell asleep in the long prayer, and of Hiram Nute with his fiddle. But she was afraid that such work would never amount to much and she hoped that Estelle had not neglected her studies for it.
The color flamed over Estelle’s high, blue-veined forehead—it had burned hotly enough in her cheeks before—and I caught a little contemptuous quiver of her mobile lips. They seemed never likely to understand each other, those two! Octavia’s ideas and sympathies broadened slowly, slowly even with the discipline of teaching children, and of writing stories that were returned to her! And Estelle had, no doubt—how should it be otherwise—something of the “bumptiousness” of youth.