cubes
and spheres, she modelled from the antique, and at last, upon a day
almost sacred in her memory, was promoted to the life class.

And here, one morning, Dr. Ferris, interested in spite of himself in
her swift progress, found her, with a number of other young ladies and
gentlemen, earnestly at work making, from different angles of vision,
greenish clay statuettes of a handsome young Italian laborer who had
upon his person no clothes whatever. That fastidious surgeon, to whom
naked bodies, and indeed naked hearts, could have been nothing new, was
shocked almost out of his wits. He had left only the good sense and the
good manners not to make a scene. He beat instead a quiet, if
substantial, retreat, and put off the hour of reckoning. His daughter
was soiled in his eyes, and when she explained to him that a naked man
was not a naked man to her, but a "stunning" assemblage of planes,
angles, curves, lights, and shadows, he could not understand. And they
quarrelled as furiously as it is possible for well-bred persons to
quarrel. He commanded. She denied his right to command. He threatened.
She denied his right first to create a life, and then to spoil it. He
advanced the duty of children to parents, and she the duty of parents to
children. Finally Barbara, thoroughly incensed at having her mind and
her ambition held so cheap, flung out with: "Have you _never_ made a
mistake of judgment?" And was astounded to see her father wither, you
may say, and all in an instant show the first tremors she had ever seen
in him of age and a life of immense strain and responsibility. From that
moment the activity of his opposition waned. She knew that her will had
conquered, and the knowledge distressed her so that she burst
into tears.

"My dear," said her father, "I once made a very terrible mistake of
judgment. There isn't a day of my life altogether free from remorse and
regret. I have given you money and position. It isn't enough, it seems.
My dear, take the benefit of the doubt into the bargain. If I am making
another terrible mistake, you must bear at least a portion of the
responsibility."

It is curious, or perhaps only natural, that Barbara was at the moment
more interested to know what her father's great mistake of judgment had
been than in the fact that her ambition had won his tolerance and
consent, if not his approval and support. If she had asked him then and
there, for he was still greatly moved, he might have told h