gree with the old painter who
came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows. He
contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything; but
in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom the
lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter
concerning them as much as Alma Leighton. He said that instruction would
do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from
the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see,
painted in an obsolescent manner. His name was Beaton--Angus Beaton; but
he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was. His
father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it
had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native
and ancestral manner in him. He wore his black beard cut shorter than his
mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well thrown
back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about art,
which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not had a thick,
dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not
spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect
of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the ladies said that you
always thought of him as having spoken French after it was over, and
accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of him. None of
the ladies was afraid of him, though they could not believe that he was
really so deferential to their work as he seemed; and they knew, when he
would not criticise Mr. Harrington's work, that he was just acting from
principle.

They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated Alma's
work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment
recognized her as a real sister in art. He told her she ought to come to
New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter's private
class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which finally
resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were now making.
There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from past
success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with boarders in
New York. Of course the outlay was much greater. The rent of the
furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their
experiment would be little less than ruinous.

But they were n