Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 1.djvu/24

16 "How can I tell till I try?"

"What do you mean by trying, Biddy dear?"

"Why, you know—you've seen me."

"Do you call that trying?" her brother asked, smiling at her.

"Ah, Nick!" murmured the girl, sensitively. Then, with more spirit, she went on: "And please, what do you?"

"Well, this, for instance;" and her companion pointed to another bust—a head of a young man, in terra-cotta, at which they had just arrived; a modern young man, to whom, with his thick neck, his little cap and his wide ring of dense curls, the artist had given the air of a Florentine of the time of Lorenzo.

Biddy looked at the image a moment. "Ah, that's not trying; that's succeeding."

"Not altogether; it's only trying seriously."

"Well, why shouldn't I be serious?"

"Mother wouldn't like it. She has inherited the queer old superstition that art is pardonable only so long as it's bad—so long as it's done at odd hours, for a little distraction, like a game of tennis or of whist. The only thing that can justify it, the effort to carry it as far as one can (which you can't do without time and singleness of purpose), she regards as just the dangerous, the criminal element. It's the oddest hind-part-before view, the drollest immorality."

"She doesn't want one to be professional," Biddy remarked, as if she could do justice to every system.

"Better leave it alone, then: there are duffers enough."

"I don't want to be a duffer," Biddy said. "But I thought you encouraged me."