Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/135

borough hat and feathers; fancy sketch of Ruth with a wheatsheaf on her head as she “stood in tears amid the alien corn.” There was a touch of nature and a gleam of talent in them all, but they could not escape from the merry, careless, defiant glance of her eye, or the laughter-loving curl of her finely-cut lips. It was no use to pretend to tragedy; whatever character, or rather costume, it pleased her to assume for the moment, even as Niobe herself, she could never avoid looking “cheeky,” and Campbell began to perceive with an artist’s despair that he could not transmute this quality into the pensive intensity of high art. He thought the fault was in his own hand, and tried in vain other lights, other systems, but he was not artist enough to add the look of soul to the canvas which he vaguely felt was missing in his model.

In point of fact, fortune had dealt unfairly by Lizzie in giving her the empty compliment of prosperous idleness for a wedding gift. Her natural bent was simple and domestic to a fault. She would have been in her element keeping house, bustling, marketing, managing with a small income and a large family, as so many of her sisters were doing, bemoaning their fate all the time. Her head and fingers were clever and capable; she could do anything with her hands,