lunch, and sat opposite the artist's mother
at table. It was like sitting face to face with Martha Washington, I
thought. Everything was wonderful in that wonderful old house.

One thing disturbed my enjoyment of those Saturday mornings. It was a
small thing, hardly as big as a pen-wiper. It was a silver coin which
Miss Hale gave me regularly when I was going. I knew that models were
paid for sitting, but I was not a professional model. When people sat
for their portraits they usually paid the artist, instead of the
artist paying them. Of course I had not ordered this portrait, but I
had such a good time sitting that it did not seem to me I could be
earning money. But what troubled me was not the suspicion that I did
not earn the money, but that I did not know what was in my friend's
mind when she gave it to me. Was it possible that Miss Hale had asked
me to sit on purpose to be able to pay me, so that I could help pay
the rent? Everybody knew about the rent sooner or later, because I was
always asking my friends what a girl could do to make the landlady
happy. Very possibly Miss Hale had my landlady in mind when she asked
me to pose. I might have asked her--I dearly loved explanations, which
cleared up hidden motives--but her answer would not have made any
real difference. I should have accepted the money just the same. Miss
Hale was not a stranger, like Mr. Strong when he offered me a quarter.
She knew me, she believed in my cause, and she wanted to contribute to
it. Thus I, in my hair-splitting analyses of persons and motives;
while the portrait went steadily on.

It was Miss Hale who first found a use for our superfluous baby. She
came to Dover Street several times to study our tiny Celia, in
swaddling clothes improvised by my mother, after the fashion of the
old country. Miss Hale wanted a baby for a picture of the Nativity
which she was doing for her father's church; and of all the babies in
Boston, our Celia, our little Jewish Celia, was posing for the Christ
Child! It does not matter in this connection that the Infant that lies
in the lantern light, brooded over by the Mother's divine sorrow of
love, in the beautiful altar piece in Dr. Hale's church, was not
actually painted from my mother's baby, in the end. The point is that
my mother, in less than half a dozen years of America, had so far
shaken off her ancient superstitions that she feared no evil
consequence from letting her child pose for a Christian pict