Now it happened that her drawing lessons had always given her more pleasure than anything else at school, but owing to Joe Harrod's having taken her away as soon as he was allowed to do so, they had not continued long. Still, even in a short time she had made some progress; and even after leaving school she had continued to find a mournful pleasure in depicting leaf and flower forms. Left to choose her own subject, she naturally began sketching a flower—a-rosebud, half-open, with leaves.
“Don't hurry, Fan, as you did with your reading. The slower you are the better it will be,” said Miss Starbrow, taking up a volume and beginning to read, or pretending to read, for her eyes were on the face of the girl most of the time.
Fan, happily unconscious of the other's regard, gave eight or ten minutes to her drawing, and then Miss Starbrow took it in her hands to examine it.
“This is really very well done,” she said, “but what in goodness' name did they teach you drawing for!' What would be the use of it after leaving school? Well, yes, it might be useful in one way. It astonishes me to think how you were trying to live, Fan. You were certainly not fit for that hard rough work, and would have starved at it. You were made, body and mind, in a more delicate mould, and for something better. I think that with all you have learnt at school, and with your appearance, especially with those truthful eyes of yours and that sweet voice, you might have got a place as nursery governess, to teach small children, or something of that sort. Why did you go starving about the streets, Fan?”
“But no one would take me with such clothes, ma'am. They wouldn't look at me or speak to me even in the little shops where I went to ask for work.”
Miss Starbrow uttered a curious little laugh.
“What a strange thing it seems,” she said, “that a few shillings to buy decent clothes may alter a person's destiny. With the shillings—about as many as the man of God pays for his sirloin—shelter from the weather and temptations to evil, three meals a day, a long pleasant life, husband and children, perhaps, and at last—Heaven. And without them, rags and starvation and the streets, and—well, this is a question for the mighty intellect of a man and a theologian, not for mine. I dare say you don't know what I'm talking about, Fan?”
“Not all, ma'am, but I think I understand a little.”
“Very little, I should think. Don't try to understand too much, my poor girl. Perhaps before you are eighty, if you live so long, you will discover that you didn't even understand a little. Ah, Fan, you have been sadly cheated by destiny! Childhood without joy, and girlhood without hope. I wish I could give you happiness to make up for it all, but I can't be Providence to anyone.”
“Oh, ma'am, you have made me so happy!” exclaimed Fan, the tears springing to her eyes.