Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/154

146 well when it's done," said the girl. "I've got money now; I make it, you know—a good lot of it. It's too delightful, after scraping and starving. Try it and you'll see. Give up the base, bad world."

"But isn't it supposed to be the base, bad world that pays?"

"Precisely; make it pay, without mercy—squeeze it dry. That's what it's meant for—to pay for art. Ah, if it wasn't for that! I'll bring you a quantity of photographs, to-morrow—you must let me come back to-morrow: it's so amusing to have them, by the hundred, all for nothing, to give away. That's what takes mamma most: she can't get over it. That's luxury and glory; even at Castle Nugent they didn't do that. People used to sketch me, but not so much as mamma veut bien le dire; and in all my life I never had but one poor little carte-de-visite, when I was sixteen, in a plaid frock, with the banks of a river, at three francs the dozen."