She got out of Octavia’s room rather quickly and I followed her. At the threshold of her own door she turned upon me, her bosom heaving in the old childish way and her eyes shining moistly.
“You don’t think anything of them, either of you!” she burst forth. “And I hoped to earn some money by them. I must earn some money! I can’t have Dave owe that dreadful boy who told of him—told lies of him, too!”
“He borrowed the money for something,” I said, stubbornly—disagreeably—I am afraid; “and, Estelle, you are only eighteen. You can’t hope to earn much yet. After you are graduated, perhaps you may get the Mile End school that Octavia used to teach”—for Octavia now had a kindergarten of her own—“or help her in her school.”
“No,” said Estelle, slowly, “I shall never help Octavia in her school. It isn’t that I don’t like the little children—although I would rather draw them than teach them—but I couldn’t get along with Octavia. She never liked me. If I were to help you——”
But I shook my head hastily. Estelle had no talent for cheese or preserves. I shuddered to think of the time when she put sweet marjoram into the cheese instead of sage! And Leander complained that all her turkeys and chickens died in debt, she and Dave would overfeed them so, being so tender-hearted that they were always afraid that something might go unfed. The hens were so fat that they couldn’t lay—and the number of superfluous roosters that belonged to her brood and that she wouldn’t have killed would have destroyed her profits if there had otherwise been any. No! clearly Estelle’s farming methods would never be money-making.
“You don’t think I can do anything!” she cried; and although it was half-jokingly I knew that the tears in her eyes were hot. “You will see! You will see!” and her eyes flashed through the tears.
Now by this time I was twenty-four and felt very old and wise, and although I had not been far from Palmyra in my life, yet that sort of association with the world which demands of it its money for the products of one’s hand and brains is a developing experience. If any one scoffingly refuses to regard sage cheese and preserves, that command the very best market, as brain products, why let them try to make them.
“I think you don’t quite know yet what it is to do things for money,” I said. And then my heart was suddenly wrung with pity for the poor young thing who was putting her whole heart and soul into work in which no one else would ever see what she saw, which the world would never regard as worth its consideration—much less its money! I could understand that it would be far worse to fail in this way than in cheese and preserves.
I had my own misgivings about “Evelyn Marchmont,” but it did not seem so pitiful and futile an undertaking as Estelle’s pictures. Some time I thought she would find out that our Octavia was worth listening to.
“I—we didn’t say that they were bad,” I stammered. “Only they don’t look quite like the other girls’ drawings and I don’t want you to think that you can get money for them and be disappointed. Money is the hardest thing in the world to get, you know.”