about what she ought or ought not to do; usually there was
but one obvious and important thing to be done. But that afternoon she
remonstrated with herself severely. She told herself that she was
missing a great deal; that she ought to be more willing to take advice
and to go to see things. She was sorry that she had let months pass
without going to the Art Institute. After this she would go once a week.

The Institute proved, indeed, a place of retreat, as the sand hills or
the Kohlers' garden used to be; a place where she could forget Mrs.
Andersen's tiresome overtures of friendship, the stout contralto in the
choir whom she so unreasonably hated, and even, for a little while, the
torment of her work. That building was a place in which she could relax
and play, and she could hardly ever play now. On the whole, she spent
more time with the casts than with the pictures. They were at once more
simple and more perplexing; and some way they seemed more important,
harder to overlook. It never occurred to her to buy a catalogue, so she
called most of the casts by names she made up for them. Some of them she
knew; the Dying Gladiator she had read about in "Childe Harold" almost
as long ago as she could remember; he was strongly associated with Dr.
Archie and childish illnesses. The Venus di Milo puzzled her; she could
not see why people thought her so beautiful. She told herself over and
over that she did not think the Apollo Belvedere "at all handsome."
Better than anything else she liked a great equestrian statue of an
evil, cruel-looking general with an unpronounceable name. She used to
walk round and round this terrible man and his terrible horse, frowning
at him, brooding upon him, as if she had to make some momentous decision
about him.

The casts, when she lingered long among them, always made her gloomy. It
was with a lightening of the heart, a feeling of throwing off the old
miseries and old sorrows of the world, that she ran up the wide
staircase to the pictures. There she liked best the ones that told
stories. There was a painting by Gerome called "The Pasha's Grief" which
always made her wish for Gunner and Axel. The Pasha was seated on a rug,
beside a green candle almost as big as a telegraph pole, and before him
was stretched his dead tiger, a splendid beast, and there were pink
roses scattered about him. She loved, too, a picture of some boys
bringing in a newborn calf on a litter, the cow walking beside it and