tobacco. Neither illustrated papers, periodicals:
neither editors nor publishers would have anything to do with them. One
or two took more care, and returned the drawings quite clean; one sent a
note saying that they promised well.

Poor Amaryllis! They promised well, and she wanted half a sovereign
_now_. If a prophet assured a man that the picture he could not now
dispose of would be worth a thousand pounds in fifty years, what
consolation would that be to him?

They were all a total failure. So many letters could not be received in
that dull place without others in the house seeing what was going on.
Once now and then Amaryllis heard a step on the stairs--a shuffling,
uncertain step--and her heart began to beat quicker, for she knew it was
her mother. Somehow, although she loved her so dearly, she felt that
there was not much sympathy between them. She did not understand her
mother; the mother did not understand the daughter. Though she was
working for her mother's sake, when she heard her mother's step she was
ashamed of her work.

Mrs. Iden would come in and shuffle round the room, drawing one foot
along the floor in an aggravating way she had, she was not lame, and
look out of window, and presently stand behind Amaryllis, and say--

"Ah! you'll never do anything at that. Never do anything. I've seen too
much of it. Better come down and warm yourself."

Now this annoyed Amaryllis so much because it seemed so inconsistent.
Mrs. Iden blew up her husband for having no enterprise, and then turned
round and discouraged her daughter for being enterprising, and this,
too, although she was constantly talking about the superiority of the
art employments of the Flammas in London to the clodhopper work around
her.

Amaryllis could never draw a line till her mother had gone downstairs
again, and then the words kept repeating themselves in her ear--"Never
do no good at that, never do no good at that."

If we were to stay to analyse deeply, perhaps we should find that
Amaryllis was working for a mother of her own imagination, and not for
the mother of fact.

Anyone who sits still, writing, drawing, or sewing, feels the cold very
much more than those who are moving indoors or out. It was bitterly cold
in the gaunt garret, the more so because the wind came unchecked through
the wire network of the window in the next room. But for that her
generous young heart cared nothing, nor for the still colder wind of
failure.

S