Part 43

"How much use can a man be to a girl when he knows that he can't be of the greatest?"

"None, if he is sure."

"He is perfectly sure."

"He had better let her alone, then. He had better not try."

"I am going to try. But I thank you for your advice more than if I were going to take it."

They parted laughing; and Mrs. Westley was contented to be left with the mystery which she believed was no mystery to her.

Ludlow went home and wrote to Cornelia:

"DEAR MISS SAUNDERS: I hear you are not going to try to get your picture into the Exhibition. I will not pretend not to understand why, and you would not wish me to; so I feel free to say that you are making a mistake. You ought to offer your picture; I think it would be accepted, and you have no right to forego the chance it would give you, for the only reason you can have. I know that Mr. Wetmore would be glad to advise you about it; and I am sure you will believe that I have not asked him to do so.

"Yours sincerely,

"W. LUDLOW."

Cornelia turned this letter in many lights, and tried to take it in many ways; but in the end she could only take it in the right way, and she wrote back:

"DEAR MR. LUDLOW: I thank you very much for your letter, and I am going to do what you say. Yours sincerely,

"CORNELIA SAUNDERS.

"P. S. I do appreciate your kindness very much."

She added this postscript after trying many times to write a reply that would seem less blunt and dry; but she could not write anything at all between a letter that she felt was gushing and this note which certainly could not be called so; she thought the postscript did not help it much, but she let it go.

As soon as she had done so, it seemed to her that she had no reason for having done so, and she did not see how she could justify it to Charmian, whom she had told that she should not offer her picture. She would have to say that she had changed her mind simply because Mr. Ludlow had bidden her, and she tried to think how she could make that appear sufficient. But Charmian was entirely satisfied. "Oh, yes," she said, "that was the least you could do, when he asked you. You certainly owed him that much. Now," she added mystically, "he never can say a thing."

They were in Charmian's studio, where Cornelia's sketch of her had been ever since she left working on it; and Charmian ran and got it, and set it where they could both see it in the light of the new event.

It's magnificent, Cornelia. There's no other word for it. Did you know he was going to give me his?"

"Yes, he told me he was going to," said Cornelia, looking at her sketch, with a dreamy suffusion of happiness in her face.

"It's glorious, but it doesn't come within a million miles of yours. Mr. Wetmore isn't on the Committee, this year, but he knows them all, and----"

Cornelia turned upon her. "Charmian Maybough, if you breathe, if you dream a word to him about it I will never speak to you. If my picture can't get into the Exhibition without the help of friends----"

"Oh, I shan't speak to him about it," Charmian hastened to assure her. In pursuance of her promise, she only spoke to Mrs. Wetmore, and at the right time Wetmore used his influence with the committee. Then, for the reason, or the no reason that governs such matters, or because Cornelia's picture was no better than too many others that were accepted, it was refused.

XXXIV.

The blow was not softened to Cornelia by her having prophesied to Charmian as well as to herself, that she knew her picture would be refused. Now she was aware that at the bottom of her heart she had always hoped and believed it would be accepted. She had kept it all from her mother, but she had her fond, proud visions of how her mother would look when she got her letter saying that she had a picture in the Exhibition, and how she would throw on her sacque and bonnet, and run up to Mrs. Burton for an explanation and full sense of the honor. In these fancies Cornelia even had them come to New York, to see her picture in position; it was not on the line, of course, and yet it was not skyed.

Her pride was not involved, and she suffered no sting of wounded vanity from its rejection: her hurt was in a tenderer place. She would not have cared how many people knew of her failure, if her mother and Mrs. Burton need not have known; but she wrote faithfully home of it, and tried to make neither much nor little of it. She forbade Charmian the indignation which she would have liked to vent, but she let her cry over the event with her. No one else knew that it had actually happened except Wetmore and Ludlow; she was angry with them at first for encouraging her to offer the picture, but Wetmore came and was so mystified and humbled by its refusal, that she forgave him and even comforted him for his part in the affair.

"She acted like a little man about it," he reported to Ludlow. "She'll do. When a girl can take a blow like that the way she does, she makes you wish that more fellows were girls. When I had my first picture refused, it laid me up. But I'm not going to let this thing rest. I'm going to see if that picture can't be got into the American Artists'."

"Better not," said Ludlow so vaguely that Wetmore thought he must mean something.

"Why?"