nd her family. "I'll do
something for Fan," he said. "She's a different sort from Charles.
McArdle seems a hard-workin' chap, the kind that a little help wouldn't
spile. What do you think of buyin' them a bit of a house somewhere?"

Bertha listened with a languor of interest new to her, and when he
repeated his question and asked her if she were tired, she answered:
"Yes; and I think I'll go to bed early to-night. It's been a hard day."

CHAPTER XVIII

BERTHA'S PORTRAIT IS DISCUSSED

Joe Moss was delighted with the Haneys, for they talked of their native
West as people should talk. They were as absolute in their convictions
as a Kentuckian. For them there was no other "God's country," and as it
was his latest dream to go West and "do a big thing on a cliff or
something" he put off every other engagement to enjoy their racy speech.
He said at the first sitting: "I've had an idea of working the
Thorwaldsen trick: find some fine site out there, some wall of rock
close to the railway, and hew out a monster grizzly or mountain lion.
The railway could then advertise it, you see; trains could stop there
'five minutes to permit a view of Moss's Lion'; they could use a cut of
it on all their folders. If there was a spring near by they could
advertise the water and bottle it, a picture of my lion on the label.
Ah, it is a fine scheme!"

"'Tis so," said Haney. "I wonder nobody thought of it before."

"It takes a Yankee, after all, to plan new suspender buttons," the
sculptor replied. And all the time he talked his hands were dabbling,
his thumbs gouging, his dibble cutting and smoothing.

Haney watched him with amused glance. "Sure, I didn't know ye went at it
so. I thought ye chipped each picture out o' stone." And when the
process of molding in plaster was explained to him, he said: "'Tis like
McArdle's trade entirely. He takes a rise in the world since I know he's
an artist like yourself."

"What is his 'line'?"

"Pattern-maker for a stove foundry."

Moss beamed. "Just what I'd like to be if they'd only pay a little more
wages and furnish a better place to work."

Bertha never knew when he was in earnest, so habitually mocking was his
tone. But she grew towards a perception of his ideal, and dimly
apprehended in him a mind far beyond any she had ever known. Mrs. Moss,
almost as reticent as Mrs. Haney herself, came and went about the studio
brightly, briskly, keeping vigilant eye on her husband's mail,
mois