The Coast of Bohemia | Page 5

older voice, suggestive of
patience and amiability. "Don't tear them, anyway!"
"I shall! I don't care if I tear them all to pieces."
There was a sound of quick steps, and of the angry swirl of skirts, and
the crackling and rending of paper.
"There, now!" said the older voice. "You've dropped one."
"I don't care! I hope they'll trample it under their great stupid hoofs."
The paper, whatever it was, came skating out under the draped tabling
in the section where Ludlow stood, arrested in his sad employment by
the unseen drama, and lay at his feet. He picked it up, and he had only
time to glance at it before he found himself confronted by a fiercely
tearful young girl who came round the corner of his section, and
suddenly stopped at sight of him. With one hand she pressed some
crumpled sheets of paper against, her breast; the other she stretched
toward Ludlow.
"Oh! will you----" she began, and then she faltered; and as she turned
her little head aside for a backward look over her shoulder, she made

him, somehow, think of a hollyhock, by the tilt of her tall, slim, young
figure, and by the colors of her hat from which her face flowered; no
doubt the deep-crimson silk waist she wore, with its petal-edged ruffle
flying free down her breast, had something to do with his fantastic
notion. She was a brunette, with the lightness and delicacy that
commonly go with the beauty of a blonde. She could not have been
more than fifteen; her skirts had not yet matured to the full womanly
length; she was still a child.
A handsome, mild, middle-aged woman appeared beside the stormy
young thing, and said in the voice which Ludlow had already heard,
"Well, Cornelia!" She seemed to make more account than the girl made
of the young fellow's looks. He was of the medium height for a man,
but he was so slight that he seemed of lower stature, and he eked out an
effect of distinction by brushing his little moustache up sharply at the
corners in a fashion he had learned in France, and by wearing a little
black dot of an imperial. His brow was habitually darkened by a
careworn frown, which came from deep and anxious thinking about the
principles and the practice of art. He was very well dressed, and he
carried himself with a sort of worldly splendor which did not intimidate
the lady before him. In the country women have no more apprehension
of men who are young and stylish and good-looking than they have in
the city; they rather like them to be so, and meet them with confidence
in any casual encounter.
The lady said, "Oh, thank you," as Ludlow came up to the girl with the
paper, and then she laughed with no particular intention, and said, "It's
one of my daughter's drawings."
"Oh, indeed!" said Ludlow, with a quick perception of the mother's
pride in it, and of all the potentialities of prompt intimacy. "It's very
good."
"Well, I think so," said the lady, while the girl darkled and bridled in
young helplessness. If she knew that her mother ought not to be
offering a stranger her confidence like that, she did not know what to
do about it. "She was just going to take them home," said the mother
vaguely.

"I'm sorry," said Ludlow. "I seem to be a day after the fair, as far as
they're concerned."
"Well, I don't know," said the mother, with the same amiable vagueness.
She had some teeth gone, and when she smiled she tried to hide their
absence on the side next Ludlow; but as she was always smiling she did
not succeed perfectly. She looked doubtfully at her daughter, in the
manner of mothers whom no severity of snubbing can teach that their
daughters when well-grown girls can no longer be treated as infants. "I
don't know as you'd think you had lost much. We didn't expect they
would take the premium, a great deal."
"I should hope not," said Ludlow. "The competition was bad enough."
The mother seemed to divine a compliment in this indefinite speech.
She said: "Well, I don't see myself why they didn't take it."
"There was probably no one to feel how much better they were," said
Ludlow.
"Well, that's what I think," said the mother, "and it's what I tell her."
She stood looking from Ludlow to her daughter and back, and now she
ventured, seeing him so intent on the sketch he still held, "You an
artist?"
"A student of art," said Ludlow, with the effect of uncovering himself
in a presence.
The mother did not know what to make of it apparently; she said
blankly, "Oh!" and then added