was applauded by him and assumed by the world in general to be a very
talented young lady; but when, her artistic impulses--if not her
technique--having strengthened amazingly, she insisted upon the steadier
routine of an art school, she met with an opposition as narrow, it
seemed to her, as it was firm. Her own will in the matter, however,
proved the stronger. And having passed with excellent rapidity through
those grades of the school in which the student is taught to make cubes
and spheres, she modelled from the antique, and at last, upon a day
almost sacred in her memory, was promoted to the life class.

And here, one morning, Dr. Ferris, interested in spite of himself in
her swift progress, found her, with a number of other young ladies and
gentlemen, earnestly at work making, from different angles of vision,
greenish clay statuettes of a handsome young Italian laborer who had
upon his person no clothes whatever. That fastidious surgeon, to whom
naked bodies, and indeed naked hearts, could have been nothing new, was
shocked almost out of his wits. He had left only the good sense and the
good manners not to make a scene. He beat instead a quiet, if
substantial, retreat, and put off the hour of reckoning. His daughter
was soiled in his eyes, and when she explained to him that a naked man
was not a naked man to her, but a "stunning" assemblage of planes,
angles, curves, lights, and shadows, he could not understand. And they
quarrelled as furiously as it is possible for well-bred persons to
quarrel. He commanded. She denied his right to command. He threatened.
She denied his right first to create a life, and then to spoil it. He
advanced the duty of children to parents, and she the duty of parents to
children. Finally Barbara, thoroughly incensed at having her mind and
her ambition held so cheap, flung out with: "Have you _never_ made a
mistake of judgment?" And was astounded to see her father wither, you
may say, and all in an instant show the first tremors she had ever seen