“Papa wants”--she uttered the first word with a peculiar intonation. “Papa (I don’t know whether he is my father,” she added indifferently) “wants me to go away; no matter where, he says. I went to school, but they didn’t suit me there. Now I’m left in peace. Mamma talks to them when they come after me; she has such a proud way with her, mamma has.” “And what do your parents do?” She looked up with a scornful dismissal of the subject and made no reply. Suddenly she laughed under her breath. “Such a funny word!” she said. “It’s out of the catechism, isn’t it?” “What word?” “Parents. Oh, I know it means father and mother,” she drawled the words out to a comic length. “Mother is slender,” she continued, “but she’s beginning to get fat and lace herself. You ought to see her when she’s drunk soda water, oh, you just ought to see her! Her teeth aren’t as pretty any more either; she envies me mine.” “And what does she want you to be?” “It’s all the same”--her voice was cuttingly hard--“it’s all the same, whatever she wants; it’s all the same, what she says. I shan’t do it anyhow.” It was easy to imagine her home after that; what was worse, it was easy, too, to imagine her future. She seemed to have tired of being examined now, and turned around to one of the sketchers. “Why do you paint girls?” she inquired of the corpulent Hans. “Hm! Because they’re pretty.” “Why don’t you paint war, or red clouds like those there?” She pointed to a landscape opposite her. “Because I’ve never seen a war.” “But red clouds you’ve seen surely. I’ve seen much handsomer ones than those; they don’t really burn.” It was an impressionistic canvas; darkness creeping along the ground, darkness leaping up to meet one from the fields, and in the midst of the fading red off in the distance a lonely shivering poplar, the one thing that rose above the plain, cutting like a sword against the sky proudly and tragically. As the girl looked at it her pupils widened, contracted and widened and trembled; she had understood it at once, and her face became fixed by the sorrow of the picture. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it hard to learn to paint?” “That depends. Can you draw?” “I can’t do anything but play the piano. Mamma taught me that, but I can play better than she does, though we have no piano now.” “Do you sing, then?” “No, I _can’t_ sing”--her voice sounded more mournful than at any time before, almost despairing--“I can’t sing at all now.” “Probably your voice is changing; you’ll have plenty of voice if you’ve had it before.” “Oh, yes,” she replied impatiently; “it isn’t the voice I’m thinking of, but I can never sing any more.” She raised her head slowly and regarded us all with a swift, deep, strangely searching look. “What do you do that for?” we asked. “What are you looking for?” “I’m looking at your eyes.” Her voice was childish, naïvely frank and so earnest! “Do you often do so?” “Yes, among strangers; then I don’t look at them any more.”