“You see, she expected to sell her pictures at once, and no one would buy them,” continued Alice Yorke, who had drawn us into a doorway, out of the way of the crowd. “Of course, she will not mind having you know.”
“Oh, the poor child! the poor child!” cried Octavia. And I know I had never heard her speak of Estelle in just that tone before in my life.
“No one ought to expect to sell pictures at once,” continued Alice, judicially. “My friend, Miss Carruthers, who is an artist, says so. You have to try and try, until you have made a name for yourself.”
“Then how do you begin to make a name?” demanded Octavia, almost fiercely, sympathetic from the depths of her own experience.
“Well, you must have originality, or strike the popular taste in some way,” replied Miss Carruthers. “I can’t exactly say, because I haven’t done it yet,” she added, with a frank laugh.
“The poor child!” repeated Octavia, from her full heart. That Estelle should have to face these baffling problems that had overcome her filled Octavia with a new sympathy for her. And that one touch of sympathy had made her closer kin than she ever had been before. “Let us go to her at once! How could you leave her alone?” she added, reproachfully.
And then the superiority of the elder sister, of the practical New England stock suddenly asserted itself. “How could the child be so foolish as to think she could sell her pictures! I could have told her,” she said.
Our eyes met then, and I never did think that Octavia had much sense of humor, but she laughed drearily.
“You’re quite right, Bathsheba,” she said—although I had not made a remark. “I am not the one to say anything.”
We followed the girls up over the hill where the State House stood, an imposing building, with a gilded dome, that looked curiously frivolous to me, like a child’s toy, and into a stately, old-fashioned mansion, on a back street. It was only a stone’s throw from the busy centre, but as peaceful as Palmyra on a Sunday morning.