The Coast of Bohemia | Page 6

impressively, to her daughter: "Why
don't you show them to him, Cornelia?"
"I should think it a great favor," said Ludlow, intending to be
profoundly respectful. But he must have overdone it. The girl
majestically gave her drawings to her mother, and marched out of the
aisle.
Ludlow ignored her behavior, as if it had nothing to do with the

question, and began to look at the drawings, one after another, with
various inarticulate notes of comment imitated from a great French
master, and with various foreign phrases, such as "Bon! Bon! Pas
mauvais! Joli! Chic!" He seemed to waken from them to a
consciousness of the mother, and returned to English. "They are very
interesting. Has she had instruction?"
"Only in the High School, here. And she didn't seem to care any for
that. She seems to want to work more by herself."
"That's wrong," said Ludlow, "though she's probably right about the
High School."
The mother made bold to ask, "Where are you taking lessons?"
"I?" said Ludlow, dreamily. "Oh! everywhere."
"I thought, perhaps," the mother began, and she stopped, and then
resumed, "How many lessons do you expect to take?"

IV.
Ludlow descended from the high horse which he saw it was really
useless for him to ride in that simple presence. "I didn't mean that I was
a student of art in that sense, exactly. I suppose I'm a painter of some
sort. I studied in Paris, and I'm working in New York--if that's what
you mean."
"Yes," said the lady, as if she did not know quite what she meant.
Ludlow still remained in possession of the sketches, and he now looked
at them with a new knot between his eyebrows. He had known at the
first glance, with the perception of one who has done things in any art,
that here was the possibility of things in his art, and he had spoken
from a generous and compassionate impulse, from his recognition of
the possibility, and from his sympathy with the girl in her defeat. Now
his conscience began to prick him. He asked himself whether he had

any right to encourage her, whether he ought not rather to warn her. He
asked her mother: "Has she been doing this sort of thing long?"
"Ever since she was a little bit of a thing," said the mother. "You might
say she's been doing it ever since she could do anything; and she ain't
but about fifteen, now. Well, she's going on sixteen," the mother added,
scrupulously. "She was born the third of July, and now it's the
beginning of September. So she's just fifteen years and a little over two
months. I suppose she's too young to commence taking lessons
regularly?"
"No one would be too young for that," said Ludlow, austerely, with his
eyes on the sketch. He lifted them, and bent them frankly and kindly on
the mother's face. "And were you thinking of her going on?" The
mother questioned him for his exact meaning with the sweet unwisdom
of her smile. "Did you think of her becoming an artist, a painter?"
"Well," she returned, "I presume she would have as good a chance as
anybody, if she had the talent for it."
"She has the talent for it," said Ludlow, "and she would have a better
chance than most--that's very little to say--but it's a terribly rough
road."
"Yes," the mother faltered, smiling.
"Yes. It's a hard road for a man, and it's doubly hard for a woman. It
means work that breaks the back and wrings the brain. It means for a
woman, tears, and hysterics, and nervous prostration, and
insanity--some of them go wild over it. The conditions are bad air, and
long hours, and pitiless criticism; and the rewards are slight and
uncertain. One out of a hundred comes to anything at all; one out of a
thousand to anything worth while. New York is swarming with girl
art-students. They mostly live in poor boarding-houses, and some of
them actually suffer from hunger and cold. For men the profession is
hazardous, arduous; for women it's a slow anguish of endeavor and
disappointment. Most shop-girls earn more than most fairly successful
art-students for years; most servant-girls fare better. If you are rich, and

your daughter wishes to amuse herself by studying art, it's all very well;
but even then I wouldn't recommend it as an amusement. If you're
poor----"
"I presume," the mother interrupted, "that she would be self-supporting
by the time she had taken six months' lessons, and I guess she could get
along till then."
Ludlow stared at the amiably smiling creature. From her unruffled
composure his warning had apparently fallen like water from the back
of a goose. He saw that it would be idle to go on,