Part 9

"I guess if you didn't break down teaching school, that you hated, you won't break down studying art, when you love it so."

"Well," Cornelia said, with the air of putting an end to the audience, "I guess there's no great hurry about it."

She let her mother follow Mrs. Burton out, recognizing with a smile of scornful intelligence the ladies' wish to have the last word about her to themselves.

VIII.

"I don't know as I ever saw her let herself go so far before," said Mrs. Saunders, leaning on the top of the closed gate, and speaking across it to Mrs. Burton on the outside of the fence. "I guess she's thinking about it, pretty seriously. She's got money enough, and more than enough."

"Well," said Mrs. Burton, "I'm going to write to Mr. Ludlow about it, as soon as I get home, and I know I can get him to say something that'll decide her."

"So do!" cried Mrs. Saunders, delighted.

She lingered awhile talking of other things, so as to enable herself to meet Cornelia with due unconsciousness when she returned to her.

"Have you been talking me over all this time, mother?" the girl asked.

"We didn't hardly say a word about you," said her mother, and now she saw what a good thing it was that she had staid and talked impersonalities with Mrs. Burton.

"Well, one thing I know," said the girl, "if she gets that Mr. Ludlow to encourage me, I'll never go near New York in the world."

Mrs. Saunders escaped into the next room, and answered back from that safe distance, "I guess you'd better get her to tell you what she's going to do."

When she returned, the girl stood looking dreamily out of the little crooked panes of the low window. She asked, with her back to her mother, "What would you do, if I went?"

"Oh, I should get along," said Mrs. Saunders with the lazy piety which had never yet found Providence to fail it. "I should get Miss Snively to go in with me, here. She ain't making out very well, alone, and she could be company to me in more ways than one."

"Yes," said the girl, in a deep sigh. "I thought of her." She faced about.

"Why, land, child!" cried her mother, "what's the matter?"

Cornelia's eyes were streaming with tears, and the passion in her heart was twisting her face with its anguish. She flung her arms round her mother's neck, and sobbed on her breast. "Oh, I'm going, I'm going, and you don't seem to care whether I go or stay, and it'll kill me to leave you."

Mrs. Saunders smiled across the tempest of grief in her embrace, at her own tranquil image in the glass, and took it into the joke. "Well, you ain't going to leave this minute," she said, smoothing the girl's black hair. "And I don't really care if you never go, Nie. You mustn't go on my account."

"Don't you want me to?"

"Not unless you do."

"And you don't care whether I'm ever an artist or not?"

"What good is your being an artist going to do me?" asked her mother, still with a joking eye on herself in the mirror.

"And I'm perfectly free to go or to stay, as far as your wish is concerned?"

"Well!" said Mrs. Saunders, with insincere scorn of the question.

The girl gave her a fierce hug; she straightened herself up, and dashed the water from her eyes. "Well, then," she said, "I'll see. But promise me one thing, mother."

"What is it?"

"That you won't ask me a single thing about it, from this out, if I never decide!"

"Well, I won't, Nie. I promise you that. I don't want to drive you to anything. And I guess you know ten times as well what you want to do, as I do, anyway. I ain't going to worry you."