The upshot of it was that his mother swooped upon him one day just as he was finishing a particularly elaborate drawing. It was taken from him and shown in excited secrecy to John Osprey. Osprey was cut of a different cloth from Meadowburn. In a ruminant, half-serious talk (a ray of amusement flickered in his eye on actually facing the boy alone) he quoted the Scripture according to St. Paul, and enjoined him to resist putting away childish things until he was on the way to become a man. Then he dropped a sly hint that if the youthful artist really had to draw improper subjects it would be a good thing to keep them from his mother. There was other good advice to the effect that it was both harder and more practical to draw people the way they were usually seen in life, but this passed largely over Potter’s head. He promptly diagnosed the interview as a vindication and he saw no harm in telling the adventure to Ellen, but to his utter surprise she was inexpressibly shocked; so much so that she left him on the Meadowburn steps without even a good-night. As he had related the story, coolly, indeed boastfully to her, the feeling came over her that the next time she raised her eyes to observe him she would see a coarse, swarthy young man with stubble whiskers whom she ought to be afraid of. The contrast between this fancy and his actual appearance was a little laughable--yet the notion of his interest in a woman’s body, a thing he could not, as she reasoned, naturally have seen or even been strongly moved to see, was more than she could grasp. For many days she watched him passing the house with other boys, his eyes casting furtive and unhappy glances at its windows, and hardened her heart. Then she could bear it no longer, and once more Potter received a scarcely legible, lady-like note of prim forgiveness. To-night he was to see her for the first time since that event.... In Creve Cœur suburb a clear division existed between the old and the new, marked by a certain trolly line. Northward lay the flat, banal commons in which the Ospreys and the Meadowburns lived, but to the south were houses mellowed by long custom, set deep in cool lawns, and facing arched avenues of maples and elms under which one trod decaying and rickety pine-board walks or crossed the tremulous bridges spanning a serpentine creek that drained the valley. The quaint modesty of Florissant lane, its uselessness and hidden charm--the thick maples and high shrubbery cutting off even the sight of neighbouring windows--made it a fairy road, a retreat in which Potter had already learned to spend fine mornings of October and May when his mother thought him safely at school. As for Ellen, her first autumn glimpse of it, nearly a year ago, had taken her back to greener memories in the north. She could never walk there too often; it was as near to complete demoralization and unbounded luxury as anything her starved imagination could picture.