"I should think it a great favor," said Ludlow, intending to be profoundly respectful. But he must have overdone it. The girl majestically gave her drawings to her mother, and marched out of the aisle. Ludlow ignored her behavior, as if it had nothing to do with the question, and began to look at the drawings, one after another, with various inarticulate notes of comment imitated from a great French master, and with various foreign phrases, such as "_Bon! Bon! Pas mauvais! Joli! Chic!_" He seemed to waken from them to a consciousness of the mother, and returned to English. "They are very interesting. Has she had instruction?" "Only in the High School, here. And she didn't seem to care any for that. She seems to want to work more by herself." "That's wrong," said Ludlow, "though she's probably right about the High School." The mother made bold to ask, "Where are _you_ taking lessons?" "I?" said Ludlow, dreamily. "Oh! everywhere." "I thought, perhaps," the mother began, and she stopped, and then resumed, "How many lessons do you expect to take?" IV. Ludlow descended from the high horse which he saw it was really useless for him to ride in that simple presence. "I didn't mean that I was a student of art in that sense, exactly. I suppose I'm a painter of some sort. I studied in Paris, and I'm working in New York--if that's what you mean." "Yes," said the lady, as if she did not know quite what she meant. Ludlow still remained in possession of the sketches, and he now looked at them with a new knot between his eyebrows. He had known at the first glance, with the perception of one who has done things in any art, that here was the possibility of things in his art, and he had spoken from a generous and compassionate impulse, from his recognition of the possibility, and from his sympathy with the girl in her defeat. Now his conscience began to prick him. He asked himself whether he had any right to encourage her, whether he ought not rather to warn her. He asked her mother: "Has she been doing this sort of thing long?" "Ever since she was a little bit of a thing," said the mother. "You _might_ say she's been doing it ever since she could do anything; and she _ain't_ but about fifteen, _now_. Well, she's going on sixteen," the mother added, scrupulously. "She was born the third of July, and now it's the beginning of September. So she's just fifteen years and a little over two months. I suppose she's too young to commence taking lessons regularly?" "No one would be too young for that," said Ludlow, austerely, with his eyes on the sketch. He lifted them, and bent them frankly and kindly on the mother's face. "And were you thinking of her going on?" The mother questioned him for his exact meaning with the sweet unwisdom of her smile. "Did you think of her becoming an artist, a painter?" "Well," she returned, "I presume she would have as good a chance as anybody, if she had the talent for it."