Not that Astra expected to win success all at once, or quickly. There was a vast deal of practicality underlying her imaginativeness and enthusiasm,--the solid foundation which is needed to make genius available. She foresaw (no one more clearly) the difficulties, delays, and disappointments, before her. But what of that? She was young; she was in good health; she had a courageous heart, an energetic temperament, and buoyant spirits; she could afford to work and wait. Her tastes were simple, her wants, outside the domain of art, few,--and, even there, deficiencies could be supplied, in a measure, by severe study and closer application. If the superior masters, the sojourn in Europe, to which she had looked forward, were denied her, she was not going to break her heart nor cloud her brow, about it. God, who had given her talent, would not leave it without due means of increase. Her duty was to work, to be brave, and to be cheerful; all else would come, in good time. This, then, was the sort of a person who had now come to dwell under the same roof with Bergan; and who straightway set to work in her studio, which was divided from his office only by the airy breadth of the main hall. Of course, he saw her frequently; her art afforded them broader, freer ground upon which to meet than is always open to man and woman. Not that the proprieties need have been scandalized had Miss Lyte's occupation been the embroidering of roses in worsted, instead of the modelling of figures in clay; for the door between studio and sitting-room stood always open, and Mrs. Lyte, from her work-table, frequently threw a passing remark into the conversation that came so freely to her ears; while Cathie continually flashed in and out like a fire-fly or a humming bird. But the worsted roses would scarcely have constituted a subject of mutual interest for the young man and woman, as did the clay figures; nor would the talks over them have run so naturally, and almost inevitably, upon the same elevated and impersonal plane of thought. Setting the worker entirely aside, Bergan could not fail to be deeply interested in the work. He liked to understand its process, and watch its progress. It was wonderful to him to see the dull clay slowly taking the shape of the viewless, informing thought. He went back to his office, not only with a deeper comprehension of the respective functions of mind and matter, but with a wider view of their scope and influence. Words, he saw, were also a kind of plastic material, through which thought revealed itself to eye and ear. He began to study expression, as well as meaning; he selected words, and constructed sentences, with greater care and conscientiousness; he saw that, since thought could only become visible through form, form was a matter of more moment, and involved a stricter duty, than he had hitherto believed.