Excerpt from Miss. Ingalis

The first was curious to remember. He had wished to know who was guilty of certain remarkably poor specimens appearing on the screen at every contest of the composition class in company with his own strong sketches and many more giving evidence, each in some degree, of power and promise. She had been pointed out to him, and he had wondered what made her try to be an artist. He had not thought her very interesting.

His interest had been awakened in time by a miser able little pastel that he found pinned near his own illustration of Poverty. Amid thirty pictures set ting forth, every one of them, the sordid horrors of poverty, - emaciated children, ragged beggars, want, nith, -there had shone forth faintly just one of a different inspiration: hers, badly drawn as usual, badly composed, showing the pure and glorious bride of Saint Francis. Something within him had bowed and done homage.

He had looked at her more attentively, and entered the second period. One can be an execrable painter, yet an exquisite person.

She looked as if she might have passed through some great sorrow and were still sad, though trying not to let it be seen. She wore mourning for her father.

He believed her to be poor, like himself. That she was delicately bred was more than evident. Poverty was perhaps new to her, and the pursuit of art her innocent conception of going to work.

She ceased coming to the art school soon after, and he saw her no more until one of the richer students held at her house a reunion of her fellow students. To this she also came, still in black, but a black less funereal; and he hardly left her side during the whole evening. They talked of their favorite authors. In answer to his prayer at parting for permission to call on her, she told him where she lived. There be gan the third period.

And now the middle of March had come, when she must be home again. He could not disguise from himself a certain emotion as he set forth a second time for her house.

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