“My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her already. She’s a delicate thing—dresses always in white; and the sweetest, simplest manners! Only eighteen years old. I’m to give three lessons a week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I don’t mind it a bit; for when I get two or three more pupils I can resume my lessons with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and let’s have a nice supper.” “That’s all right for you, Dele,” said Joe, attacking a can of peas with a carving knife and a hatchet, “but how about me? Do you think I’m going to let you hustle for wages while I philander in the regions of high art? Not by the bones of Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell papers or lay cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.” Delia came and hung about his neck. “Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies. It is not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at something else. While I teach I learn. I am always with my music. And we can live as happily as millionaires on $15 a week. You mustn’t think of leaving Mr. Magister.” “All right,” said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped vegetable dish. “But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn’t Art. But you’re a trump and a dear to do it.” “When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard,” said Delia. “Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the park,” said Joe. “And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of them in his window. I may sell one if the right kind of a moneyed idiot sees them.” “I’m sure you will,” said Delia, sweetly. “And now let’s be thankful for Gen. Pinkney and this veal roast.” During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some morning-effect sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia packed him off breakfasted, coddled, praised and kissed at 7 o’clock. Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times 7 o’clock when he returned in the evening. At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid, triumphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8×10 (inches) centre table of the 8×10 (feet) flat parlour. “Sometimes,” she said, a little wearily, “Clementina tries me. I’m afraid she doesn’t practise enough, and I have to tell her the same things so often. And then she always dresses entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But Gen. Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him, Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the piano—he is a widower, you know—and stands there pulling his white goatee. ‘And how are the semiquavers and the demisemiquavers progressing?’ he always asks. “I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-room, Joe! And those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina has such a funny little cough. I hope she is stronger than she looks. Oh, I really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle and high bred. Gen. Pinkney’s brother was once Minister to Bolivia.”