After a year or two, I realized that art was not my affair. Beside my studies in Rome with Costa, I had worked a season in Paris. All I had to show for this were some passable paintings of flowers. I lacked the artist hand. While I have continued to study art from that day to this, I then definitely renounced the idea of becoming a painter, yielding to the inevitable family calling of literature. I had learned that it is not enough to feel the love of beauty, the yearning for artistic expression; an artist must have art in his fingers as well as in his soul. Among our neighbors at this time were the Q.’s, parlous dull people. Meeting my mother one day, Mrs. Q. told a story of her daughter, ending with: “I said then, ‘Charlotte is the most wonderful of us all!’” As no one had ever thought any of the Q.’s wonderful, the phrase amused my mother so much that she used it all her life. When I brought her a check for nine dollars from _Godey’s Magazine_ for my first story, “May Blossom”, she exclaimed, “Well, Miss, it appears that you are the most wonderful of us all!” I spent this, the first money I ever earned, on a plaster cast of the Venus of Milo. I now began to write regularly for the _Boston Transcript_: occasionally for the _New York Tribune_, the _World_, and the current magazines. Much of my _Transcript_ work was art reviewing. Among other artists, this brought me in touch with John LaFarge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Albert Ryder, and Charles Walter Stetson. I was one of the first writers to cry aloud the excellence of the work of these and many another American artist, and was, in consequence, _persona grata_ at the studios. I first saw Saint-Gaudens shortly after he began the Shaw Memorial. Returning a year later, I showed surprise that the work had not gone faster. The sculptor, in gray linen blouse and white cap, laid a long nervous hand caressingly upon the clay: “This is a labor of love,” he said; “I only dare work on it in certain moods! I do this for you, and a few others.” The first winter after our return to Boston from Europe my mother and I lived in a small apartment on Spruce Street. The experiment was never repeated: wherever my mother was, she immediately became the center of a large circle. Not only did children and grandchildren and relatives to the last degree of cousinship knock at her door and demand hospitality, but many travelers and strangers visiting Boston were brought to her. During the winter of 1880-1881 we took a furnished house, Number 129 Mt. Vernon Street. Here our Roman relations, Aunt Louisa Terry and her daughter Margaret, visited us. Marion Crawford had rooms in Charles Street close by, spending his waking hours at our house. This was a happy winter, though my mother was lame from a severe fall, and was perforce much at home.