Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/217

Rh d'ouvres of the Journal de la Rive gauche a week or two hence. You don't read the Journal de la Rive gauche, I suppose?—it is, I must tell you, one of the poorest Paris papers of one sou—well, if you did, you would recognize my drawling there—not by the sketch itself, all likeness to the original will be too thoroughly taken away in the cutting—but by the letters 'K. B.' Do you see them in the corner, here?"

The scene which the drawing represented was of a character thoroughly suited to the paper for which it was destined: a young man reeling, pistol in hand, from a gambling-room—glimpses of players around the table within — the outline of a female figure, her arms wildly extended as if to clasp him, in the black night outside; a scene, melodramatic in conception, faulty in design, but drawn with exquisite fineness of touch, and not without originality and true artistic feeling in the expression and gestures of the principal actors.

"Why, this scene must surely have been taken from life," said Steven, when he had examined the block carefully. "I remember seeing one like it, or nearly like it, years ago in Sacramento. Surely," he went on, "a drawing such as this is worthy of a place in something better than—"

"A halfpenny Paris paper!" said Mademoiselle Barry, quietly. "No, indeed, it is not. There isn't such a thing, I hold, as under-rated talent. We all find exactly the place in the world"—but as she said this, she sighed—"exactly the place that we are most suited to fill. When first I began to draw—come and sit by the fire, please; as long as we talk low, we may talk—when I first thought of drawing for money, that is to say, about two years ago, I had a great opinion of myself. Because I could understand good pictures and was fond of them, and had a pretty-young-lady touch, I thought I was an artist."

She smiled: the pensive flitting smile that became her delicate face so well. "If people have an overweening opinion of their own ability," she went on, as Steven remained silent, "let them try to make money by it. No test so sure, sir. I sent over my first sketches to the —, well, to one of the best magazines in London—I know nothing of English magazines—but the clerk of the English library—we lived at Brussels, then—told me it was one of the best, and for two months heard nothing of them. Then I wrote to inquire. 'The sketches of K. B.,' I heard in three lines of reply, 'were wholly valueless to the —. It was feared they were mislaid. The risk of mis-carriage was always, as K. B. probably knew, incurred by the sender.

"And after this?" asked Steven, interested for the first time in his life, in any venture of art or literature.

"After this," said Mademoiselle Barry, "we came to Paris, and