she was not above
three or four years Rose's senior. If Hester would have let her, the
respect would have deepened to reverence, when Rose discovered what the
elder girl neither hid nor boasted of, that she was not only paying for
her art lessons at the art school, and in other respects freeing her
mother from the burden of her maintenance,--she was steadily earning a
small independent income by working incessantly at every spare moment
snatched from her studies. She worked at all sorts of designs for the
most insignificant and obscure cheaply illustrated books and periodicals
which cannot exist entirely on old plates excavated from forgotten
stores, bought by the thousand at trade sales, procured by transfer
from America, or even--now that national costumes are dying out--from
France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pass into the
hands of children--not the favoured children reared on the charming
fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and
easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the
people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain
developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, the more
meretriciously pretty or fantastically horrible, the better it is
relished by its public. Even the stereotyped representations of the
coarser fashion-plates, and the eccentric symbols and arbitrary groups
employed in the humbler trade advertisements which the magnates in such
advertising have left far behind, were food for Hester's unresting
pencil. She might have injured herself irreparably by such illegitimate
practice had she not studied as faithfully as she designed, with
something of a stern, merciless severity, hunting out and correcting in
her studies the errors of her crude work.

Stress of circumstances had lent what the French would have called a
brutal side to Hester's natural candour and sincerity. It was one
comfort that she was still more brutal to herself than to the rest of
the world.

When Rose Millar showed her sister-artist some of Rose's sketches,
Hester gave them a glance and a toss aside one after the other.

"There is nothing in that," she said coolly, "though I can see you have
taken some trouble with it. This is not so bad. No, don't show that
thing to anybody else--it will do you harm." Her highest praise was the
"not bad" of mildest negative approval. "When you go to the class
to-morrow morning," predicte