d the slashing critic, "you may depend upon
it you will be turned back to a course of free-hand, or to copying from
the round again. I don't mean that Mr. St. Foy will be as plain-spoken
as I have been; he is a great deal too much afraid of hurting your
feelings and his own, and of losing a pupil, though he is not what I
should call either a bad man or a bad teacher. He is just like the rest;
but wait and see if he does not politely turn you back to very nearly
the beginning."

"I have had good teachers before," said Rose, crumpling up her nose and
her forehead tightly, and swelling a little with wounded self-respect as
well as wounded vanity. "It is queer, to say the least, if all my
teachers were in a conspiracy to push me on to what I was not fit for,
and to give me work altogether beyond my powers."

"You asked my opinion," said Hester Jennings, with inflexible calmness,
"and I am not surprised that you do not like it when you have got
it--few people do. The truth is not generally palatable. Not that I go
in for infallibility of judgment. Wait and see what Mr. St. Foy
does--not says--to-morrow."

"But why were the others--one of them an exhibitor at the Academy and
the Grosvenor--so much mistaken?" inquired Rose, with natural
indignation.

"How can I tell? But I hope you do not imagine that exhibitors are
necessarily geniuses, or not as other men, or that they must be able to
do a little bit of tolerable teaching when it pays them to condescend to
it? Mr. St. Foy never exhibits--very likely for the good reason that his
pictures are not accepted; but it does not follow on that account that
he cannot paint a fairly good picture--better even than some which are
hung on the line--and teach very tolerably to boot."

This was a new, bewildering doctrine, and a thoroughly disheartening
state of matters, to which Rose, extinguished as she was on her own
merits, did not make any reply.

"What I think, if you care to hear further what I think," said Hester,
with a dry smile, "is that in not taking time and in being wild to paint
a complete picture--something which everybody could recognize as a
picture, and your friends admire--as if such a thing can be done to any
good purpose for years and years--you have fallen into the disastrous
habit of forgetting, or of only half remembering, what you learnt
before, as you went on learning more. At least, that is the only way in
which I can account for the wretchedness of some o