Part 8

"Do you think he would be very much excited?" asked the girl, with the sarcastic humor which had risen up in her to be one of the reliefs of her earlier intensity.

"He ought to be," said Mrs. Burton. "You know he did admire your drawings, Nelie; even those you had at the fair, that time."

"Did he?" returned the girl, carelessly. "What did he say?"

"Well, he said that if you were a boy there couldn't be any doubt about you."

Cornelia laughed. "That was a pretty safe kind of praise. I'm not likely ever to be a boy." She rose up from where they were sitting together, and went to put her drawings away in her room. When she came back, she said, "It would be fun to show him, some day, that even so low down a creature as a girl could be something."

"I wish you would, Nie," said Mrs. Burton, "I just wish you would. Why don't you go to New York, this winter, and study! Why don't you make her, Mrs. Saunders?"

"Who? Me?" said Mrs. Saunders, who sat by, in an indolent abeyance. "Oh! I ain't allowed to open my mouth any more."

"Well," said Cornelia, "don't be so ungrammatical, then, when you do it without being allowed, mother."

Mrs. Saunders laughed in lazy enjoyment. "One thing I know; if I had my way she'd have been in New York studying long ago, instead of fooling away her time out here, school-teaching."

"And where would you have been, mother?"

"Me?" said Mrs. Saunders again, incorrigibly. "Oh, I guess I should have been somewhere!"

"Well, I'll tell you what," Mrs. Burton broke in, "Nie must go, and that's all about it. I know from what Mr. Ludlow said that he believes she could be an artist. She would have to work hard, but I don't call teaching school play, exactly."

"Indeed it isn't!" said Mrs. Saunders. "I'd sooner set all day at the machine myself, and dear knows that's trying enough!"

"I'm not afraid of the hard work," said Cornelia.

"What are you afraid of, then?" demanded her mother. "Afraid of failing?"

"No; of succeeding," answered Cornelia, perversely.

"I can't make the child out," said Mrs. Saunders, with apparent pleasure in the mystery.

Cornelia went on, at least partially, to explain herself. "I mean, succeeding in the way women seem to succeed. They make me sick!"

"Oh," said her mother, with sarcasm that could not sustain itself even by a smile letting Mrs. Burton into the joke, "going to be a Rosa Bonnhure?"

Cornelia scorned this poor attempt of her mother. "If I can't succeed as men succeed, and be a great painter, and not just a great woman painter, I'd rather be excused altogether. Even Rosa Bonheur: I don't believe her horses would have been considered so wonderful if a man had done them. I guess that's what Mr. Ludlow meant, and I guess he was right. I guess if a girl wants to turn out an artist she'd better start by being a boy."

"I guess," said Mrs. Burton, with admiring eyes full of her beauty, "that if Mr. Ludlow could see you now, he'd be very sorry to have you a boy!"

Cornelia blushed the splendid red of a brunette. "There it is, Mrs. Burton! That's what's always in everybody's mind about a girl when she wants to do something. It's what a magnificent match she'll make by her painting or singing or acting! And if the poor fool only knew, she needn't draw or sing or act, to do that."

"A person would think you'd been through the wars, Cornelia," said her mother.

"I don't care! It's a shame!"

"It is a shame, Nelie," said Mrs. Burton, soothingly; and she added, unguardedly, "and I told Mr. Ludlow so, when he spoke about a girl's being happily married, as if there was no other happiness for a girl."

"Oh! He thinks that, does he?"

"No, of course, he doesn't. He has a very high ideal of women; but he was just running on, in the usual way. He told afterwards how hard the girl art-students work in New York, and go ahead of the young men, some of them--where they have the strength. The only thing is that so few of them have the strength. That's what he meant."

"What do you think, mother?" asked the girl with an abrupt turn toward her. "Do you think I'd break down?"