“Oh, you do, really? How nice!--how very nice!” Margaret sat down almost in utter bewilderment. The whole thing was like a dream--the wonderful intellectual poise of the girl-like artist; her beauty; her charm; the far-away look of almost conscious superiority in the long-lashed, indescribable eyes. “And you intend to go on with your art?” “Oh yes, to the end--to the very end of life, and beyond, too, perhaps,” answered Dora, with a merry, philosophical laugh. “I am working toward a glorious goal. Far-off Paris beckons me, Margaret, even in my sleep. Mother and I read of nothing else now, and think of nothing else. We study French in our poor way, and speak it together. Even Lionel lisps a word of it now and then. Yes, Paris and my boy mean all to me now. This has been a prison for our little family, but there the breath of art animates all life. The people are not narrow; they rank essential purity above the sordid hypocrisy of mere convention. There my boy might grow up unconscious of--but you know what I mean.” “Yes, yes,” Margaret said, a vast womanly sympathy springing up within her that fairly swept her from the condemnatory position she had so long held. “And we hope to manage it very soon now,” the artist continued. “We are hoarding up my earnings for that, and nothing else. Lionel has the soul of a poet, artist, or musician, and in Paris he can grow and expand, and there--there he will not have to face what would inevitably be his portion if he remained here. His misfortune, if it can be called that, was not of his making, and God will help me to wipe it out of his consciousness--to blot it from his fair young soul.” “Yes, yes,” Margaret said, helplessly, and she rose to go. There was nothing she could say. Dora, in some unaccountable way, seemed beyond her mental reach, a glorious, sublimated creature more of spirit than of matter. The things she had striven for in her solitude had raised her higher than her surroundings. From a narrow point of view she had lost, from a higher and broader she had gained; she was the youthful forerunner of a future army of women who would be judged by the radiance of their souls rather than by the shadows of their bodies. Dora seemed to feel her sudden nearness in spirit to her old friend. For a moment she was silent. There was a clatter of blocks on the floor of the porch, followed by the soft click-click of the pieces of wood as the child put them together again from the heap into which they had fallen. “I have always wanted to have a good, long talk with you about Fred,” Dora suddenly began, “but I hardly knew how to propose it to you after--at least, after he went away so suddenly. I felt that I ought to see you personally, and yet my pride would not let me. He had his faults, Margaret, but there were many beautiful things in his character.”