Nothing of the sort! There’s not a happier home anywhere in the country than hers, nor a better housekeeper, nor a wiser mother. It’s a perfect treat to visit in her cheerful, sunny, orderly house, or to talk with her well-brought-up, jolly children, or to see her well-fed, satisfied husband. And she herself is a joy to the eye, stout and rosy and calm. She is neither fussy nor slack, neither stingy nor extravagant, neither cold and repressed, nor slushy and sentimental. How did it happen? Probably Maria Pearl doesn’t know. But I do. And since it has happened, I can see perfectly how inevitable it was. Whenever the routine of her housekeeping begins to set too hard, and she feels like flying at muddy-footed, careless children with the acrimony natural to the good housekeeper, the memory of forlorn little Pearl among the Purdons softens and humanizes her words. And when the balance begins to swing the other way, when she tastes that first delicious, poisonous languor of letting things slide, when her Manley blood comes to the top, she has other memories to steady her. I have seen her sitting at the breakfast table, after the children are off to school, begin to sag in her chair, and reach with an indolent gesture for a tempting novel; and I knew what was in her mind as she sprang up with a start and began briskly to clear off the table and plan the lunch. ART ATMOSPHERE My cousin Angelica was one of the advance-guard. She bowed down and worshipped Whistler six months or so before the rest of humanity reached the adoration stage; and when she heard that he had opened a studio for “lady students” available to any one who would pay the entrance-fee--“just like one of the second-raters who teach at Carlorossi’s”--she lost no time in making tracks for the Passage Stanislas, where, if I remember rightly, the Whistler studio was situated. It was, just as rumor had said, like all other studio-classes of that sort, except that the fee was many times larger; but that was legitimate, Whistler being _the_ thing that winter, and _the_ thing always commanding a high price in the open market. It was a large, grimly dirty, barn-like room, with a big sky-light towards the north. In it sat some twenty or thirty more-or-less-young ladies, most of them Americans (the fee was really _very_ large) enveloped in voluminous, paint-stained aprons. They sat, as always in such studio-classes, in a circle around a platform, on which stood the model. Once a week (or was it once a fortnight?) “the Master” drove up in a cab, made his way into the room amid palpable emanations of awe, and going from canvas to canvas shed upon the bowed head of each acolyte a little of the sacred fire of his genius.