Anyway, I had taken an immense interest in Rose’s sketches, and often sat with her while she made them, and marvelled—being a hopeless duffer at such work—as the swift deft touches transferred the landscape to the paper: sky and earth and water. She may not have been remarkable, but to my eyes she was as clever as anyone sketching nature need be. Her portraits were good too: at any rate, lifelike enough to provoke cries of delight from the villagers as they recognized their neighbours. She was a straightforward performer: she cubed nothing and abhorred a vortex; but artists are curiously impressionable people, visitors to this planet rather than dwellers upon it, and at any moment she might become as wild as the wildest. And I am not surprised: the power to splash colour about must naturally lead to experimentalism. In those days, however, Rose was in the old and sober tradition, and the desire to paint filled her soul. * * * * * At last the go-fever broke out. She had been to London—that promoter of restlessness—to stay with a girl artist friend and show her work to some experts and see the exhibitions, and she came back glowing with excitement and plans. She returned with her hair intact too, to my great joy. I had nursed a terror that she might bob it. “How much money have I got?” was one of the first things she said to me after dinner. During the meal I had heard the story of her adventures. How she had stayed with her friend Vera Gray in her studio at Chelsea. It was on the Embankment, looking out on the river. “And O!” she exclaimed, “the river is exactly what Whistler made it. I mean—exactly how he painted it.” I interrupted her to say that no studied compliment could ever have pleased that painter so much as her hurried slip; but she didn’t want to hear me; she wanted to talk and tell. They had slept in the studio, in a little gallery up a ladder, where there was also a bathroom. They had cooked their own breakfast, but had gone out for other meals. I had no idea what Vera’s coffee was like! And her cups and saucers and plates: all blue and white, from Portugal: it cost—well, I’d never guess how cheap it was. I asked her if she had called on her father. “No” “Oughtn’t you to have done so?” “I suppose I ought,” she answered, “but—well, as a maffact, he would probably have disapproved of Chelsea and made me stay with him. For another reason, I didn’t really think he wanted to see me. We’ve very little in common, you know, Dombeen.” “It’s a wise child who knows when she doesn’t want her father to know she’s in town,” I said. “I’m afraid you’re right,” I added: “you haven’t much in common. But you oughtn’t to presume on that, ought you?” “Why not?” she asked, and upon my word, I couldn’t reply. Why should children be dutiful any more than their parents?