abit of
walking there, when he was painting her; she supposed they would rather
walk after their work. Cornelia said "Oh, yes," and Charmian asked, at
her perfervidest, Had Mr. Ludlow painted _her_? and Mrs. Westley
answered calmly. Yes; she believed he did not think it very successful;
her husband liked it, though. Charmian said, Oh, how much she should
like to see it, and Mrs. Westley said she must show it her some time.
Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley very pretty, but she decided that she did
not care to see Ludlow's picture of her.

His studio stood a little back from the sidewalk; it was approached by
a broad sloping pavement, and had two wide valves for the doorway. He
opened the door himself, at their ring, and they found themselves in a
large, gray room which went to the roof, with its vaulted ceiling; this
was pierced with a vast window, that descended half-way down the
northward wall. "My studio started in life as a gentleman's stable;
then it fell into the hands of a sculptor, and then it got as low as a
painter." He said to Charmian, "Mr. Plaisdell has told me how
ingeniously you treated one of your rooms that you took for a studio."

Charmian answered with dark humility, "But a studio without a painter
in it!" and there were some offers and refusals of compliment between
them, which ended in his saying that he would like to see her studio,
and her saying that Mrs. Maybough would always be glad to see him. Then
he talked with Mrs. Westley, who was very pleasant to Cornelia while
the banter with Charmian went on, and proposed to show his pictures; he
fancied that was what he had got them there, for; but he would make a
decent pretence of the Manet, first.

The Manet was one of that painter's most excessive; it was almost
insolent in its defiance of the old theory and method of art. "He had
to go too far, in those days, or he wouldn't have arrived anywhere,"
Ludlow said, dreamily, as he stood looking with them at the picture.
"He fell back to the point he had really meant to reach." He put the
picture away amidst the sighs and murmurs of Mrs. Westley and Charmian,
and the silence of Cornelia, which he did not try to break. He began to
show his own pictures, taking them at random, as it seemed, from the
ranks of canvasses faced against the wall. "You know we impressionists
are nothing if not prolific," he said, and he kept turning the frame on
his easel, now for a long picture, and now for a tall one. The prais