the sewing!" _He_ doesn't object to pose, not he! And how proud he is
of his wife! I found him alone in her studio one day. I looked over
some engravings after Titian while waiting, and the man said, "Them
engravings o' Titian's, now, ma'am, they're out o' drawing! But here's
a picture o' my wife's that's more the real thing," putting on the
easel, with affectionate pride, a painting in which two or three of
their children were grouped--a trashy, tawdry, grinning thing, and yet
with unmistakable touches of power. And this is a tale my husband has
reason to know by heart, I'm sure! Not pose! I wish he had Miss Hedges
for a wife! Anything like that girl's utter devotion to her work I've
never seen in a woman. Rain or shine, cold or heat, are all one to her;
she never has spiritually gray days when the grasshopper's a burden,
and Capua itself wouldn't have unnerved her arm and purpose. Work!
work! And everything turned to account.

Last summer when she was with us I fainted at some horrible tale or
other. She came into the room where I lay stretched flat upon the
floor, too miserable to speak, but conscious again. I must do her the
justice to say she had heard there was no serious cause for my
condition; but her first exclamation was,

"Oh, Lilian, what a color you are! Blue-white, ghastly, your face all
drawn, pinched--magnificent! Let me see your hands and nails. Ah,
capital! Capital! Poor little Lilian! But if you must faint, what a
chance for me! I couldn't think how I was to get the right tint for my
dying soldier. I never saw any one dead or wounded, and I am much too
stolid ever to faint myself. Crossing the channel I took my hand-mirror
and studied my face when I was desperately sick--but it was all green
and pathos--no good! But your color's the very thing--only you get pink
so fast! Oh, Lilian, if ever you faint again, have me called the very
instant you feel yourself going off!"

This may be called devotion to one's work? But grand work she's going
to do. She's full of genius, and has only to get over the
niminy-piminy-izing of the South Kensington School, and work abroad a
few years, to have a far more justly grounded fame than Rosa Bonheur's.

Already a few first great drops of her shower are falling. She's a
picture in the Academy, her first, and _on the line_--a picture to
which the hanging committee themselves took off their hats, and gave a
cheer for the artist; and a regular ovation she had on the priv