A Houseful of Girls

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Rose did not complain because Mrs. Jennings and her house alike were
also antiquated and formal. But the lady was not merely formal; it was a
point of honour and an inveterate weakness with her to refuse to own
that she had anything to do with such small but welcome boons to her as
boarders. There she sat, serenely disclaiming the slightest knowledge of
what had taken place, and attributing every attention to her old servant
Susan, who had been with Mrs. Jennings since her marriage
five-and-thirty years before. Or, if it was not Susan, it was her
coadjutor, Marianne, in her housemaid's neat dress, whom Susan, in her
working housekeeper's black cap and gold-rimmed spectacles, had trained
to all fit and proper service in a gentlewoman's house.

In person Mrs. Jennings was tall and thin, sallow, and slightly
hook-nosed, but still handsome. Her upright, broad-shouldered, and, by
comparison, slender waisted figure was conventionally good; but it was
hard to say how far it was her own, or how much it was made up. For she
was one of those women who consider that it is a duty which they owe to
the world not only to show themselves to the best advantage in bodily
presence to the last, but so to conceal and atone for the ravages of
time as to preserve a semblance of their maturity after it is long past.
The performance is not altogether successful. For one thing, it is apt
to call forth a spirit of contemptuous pity in the youthful spectator
who is still a long way from needing to employ such laborious,
self-denying arts.

Mrs. Jennings added to her natural air of dignity by a filmy shawl of
black lace in summer, and of white Shetland wool in winter, draped round
her without so much as a fold out of order, and by a somewhat elaborate
modification of a widow's cap which added half an inch to her height. As
Rose wrote in an early letter home, Mrs. Jennings's cap looked as if she
had been born with it on her coal black hair, or as if it were glued and
gummed there beyond any possibility of being displaced. Mother ought to
see it, take an example, and abandon her flighty, waggling head-gear.
No, on second thoughts, Rose would not like to see mother with a cap
fitted on her head like the bowl of a helmet, and giving the idea of
such stony stability that it might have been fastened with invisible
nails hammered into her skull.

Hester Jennings, Mrs. Jennings's daughter, was the young art student
like Rose's self, to whom she and her friends had naturally looked for
congenial companionship where the girl was concerned; and if she did not
find it with Hester, she was not likely to discover it in any of the
other residents at No. 12 Welby Square. Naturally Rose did not greatly
affect the remaining members of that elderly society, on which Mrs.
Jennings professed to set store. She could not help liking Mrs.
Jennings, though, alas! Rose scarcely believed in her so much as she
would have been justified in doing.

In Mrs. Jennings's daughter, who had been from the first thought of as
a friend for Rose, she believed entirely. Yet Rose had been in the
beginning both startled by Hester Jennings and disappointed in her.

Hester Jennings looked considerably older than she was, which was about
Annie Millar's age; in fact, she was prematurely worn with study and
work. She was like her mother on a larger scale, with advantages of a
fair paleness and remarkable violet-blue eyes, which Mrs. Jennings had
never possessed. Hester might have passed for a lovely young woman if
she had cared in the least to do it. But never was girl more indifferent
to such claims or more capable of doing her worst to qualify them and
render them the next thing to null and void. When Annie Millar made
Hester Jennings's acquaintance, Annie maintained that there was
something left out in Hester's composition, the part which makes a woman
desire to look well in the eyes of her neighbours, and win admiration,
though the admiration be as skin deep as the beauty which creates it.

To think that a daughter of Mrs. Jennings, an artist in her own right,
could dress so badly, with such a careless contempt for patterns and
colours, in such ill-fitting frocks and dowdy or grotesque hats! Her
preference for strident aniline dyes and gigantic stripes and checks in
the different articles of her costume looked very like perversity;
especially when it was shown that with reference to other persons, in
arranging to paint a portrait, for instance, no one, not Mrs. Jennings,
displayed such a fine sense of fitness and harmony as Hester exhibited.
Dress was to her, in her private character, mere necessary clothing,
warm or cool as the season required. It was not worth the waste of
thought implied by turning it over in her mind. Her mother dressed for
the family; or, if she did not, Hester understood that her married
sisters and sisters-in-law devoted, with success, a great deal of time
which they did not value in other respects, to the subject in question.

Speak of Rose Millar's professional notions as to the human figure being
left easy and untrammelled! Rose was a pattern of decorous neatness and
trimness compared to Hester; indeed, Rose was appalled by the total
absence of order and ceremony, not to say of embellishment, in her
friend's toilet. Hester abandoned herself permanently to deshabilles.
She appeared in a jacket indoors as well as out. She dispensed with
collars in morning and lace in evening wear. She did her hair once when
she got up, and regarded passing her hand over her head when she took
off her hat as all that was incumbent upon her afterwards. Without
intending it, and without dreaming of copying the bushes of hair in
Rossetti's pictures, Hester Jennings's sandy-coloured locks, not a good
point in her personal appearance, were, as her great-grandmother would
have cried in horror, more like a dish-mop than anything else. She
stopped short of dirt in her slovenliness because of her purity of soul,
her deep respect for the laws of health, and because of the traditions
of her class, from which she could not altogether escape. But between
her bondage to work, and her scornful neglect of other claims which she
had known over-exalted and exaggerated, she had accomplished marvels.

Hester Jennings had attained such eminence in her recklessness of
consequences, that, in place of being a nearly lovely woman, in
accordance with her profile, complexion, and glorious eyes, she was
barely good-looking because of them, in a style which repulsed many more
people than it attracted others. The sight of Hester was one of the
numerous lessons which she was destined to give to Rose Millar. It
frightened Rose into becoming tamely conventional and elaborately tidy
in dress, to the surprise and edification of her sister Annie, for it
was just at the time when Annie was most spent by her new life and
labours, and least inclined to put off her hospital gown and cap.

CHAPTER XII.

A YOUNG ARTIST'S EXPERIENCE.

Rose respected Hester Jennings. She could not help respecting her--a
creature so much in earnest, so indefatigably industrious, so
indifferent to all the distractions of the outer world which might have
taken her out of herself and away from her work, while she was not above
three or four years Rose's senior. If Hester would have let her, the
respect would have deepened to reverence, when Rose discovered what the
elder girl neither hid nor boasted of, that she was not only paying for
her art lessons at the art school, and in other respects freeing her
mother from the burden of her maintenance,--she was steadily earning a
small independent income by working incessantly at every spare moment
snatched from her studies. She worked at all sorts of designs for the
most insignificant and obscure cheaply illustrated books and periodicals
which cannot exist entirely on old plates excavated from forgotten
stores, bought by the thousand at trade sales, procured by transfer
from America, or even--now that national costumes are dying out--from
France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pass into the
hands of children--not the favoured children reared on the charming
fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and
easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the
people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain
developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, the more
meretriciously pretty or fantastically horrible, the better it is
relished by its public. Even the stereotyped representations of the
coarser fashion-plates, and the eccentric symbols and arbitrary groups
employed in the humbler trade advertisements which the magnates in such
advertising have left far behind, were food for Hester's unresting
pencil. She might have injured herself irreparably by such illegitimate
practice had she not studied as faithfully as she designed, with
something of a stern, merciless severity, hunting out and correcting in
her studies the errors of her crude work.

Stress of circumstances had lent what the French would have called a
brutal side to Hester's natural candour and sincerity. It was one
comfort that she was still more brutal to herself than to the rest of
the world.

When Rose Millar showed her sister-artist some of Rose's sketches,
Hester gave them a glance and a toss aside one after the other.

"There is nothing in that," she said coolly, "though I can see you have
taken some trouble with it. This is not so bad. No, don't show that
thing to anybody else--it will do you harm." Her highest praise was the
"not bad" of mildest negative approval. "When you go to the class
to-morrow morning," predicted the slashing critic, "you may depend upon
it you will be turned back to a course of free-hand, or to copying from
the round again. I don't mean that Mr. St. Foy will be as plain-spoken
as I have been; he is a great deal too much afraid of hurting your
feelings and his own, and of losing a pupil, though he is not what I
should call either a bad man or a bad teacher. He is just like the rest;
but wait and see if he does not politely turn you back to very nearly
the beginning."

"I have had good teachers before," said Rose, crumpling up her nose and
her forehead tightly, and swelling a little with wounded self-respect as
well as wounded vanity. "It is queer, to say the least, if all my
teachers were in a conspiracy to push me on to what I was not fit for,
and to give me work altogether beyond my powers."

"You asked my opinion," said Hester Jennings, with inflexible calmness,
"and I am not surprised that you do not like it when you have got
it--few people do. The truth is not generally palatable. Not that I go
in for infallibility of judgment. Wait and see what Mr. St. Foy
does--not says--to-morrow."

"But why were the others--one of them an exhibitor at the Academy and
the Grosvenor--so much mistaken?" inquired Rose, with natural
indignation.

"How can I tell? But I hope you do not imagine that exhibitors are
necessarily geniuses, or not as other men, or that they must be able to
do a little bit of tolerable teaching when it pays them to condescend to
it? Mr. St. Foy never exhibits--very likely for the good reason that his
pictures are not accepted; but it does not follow on that account that
he cannot paint a fairly good picture--better even than some which are
hung on the line--and teach very tolerably to boot."

This was a new, bewildering doctrine, and a thoroughly disheartening
state of matters, to which Rose, extinguished as she was on her own
merits, did not make any reply.

"What I think, if you care to hear further what I think," said Hester,
with a dry smile, "is that in not taking time and in being wild to paint
a complete picture--something which everybody could recognize as a
picture, and your friends admire--as if such a thing can be done to any
good purpose for years and years--you have fallen into the disastrous
habit of forgetting, or of only half remembering, what you learnt
before, as you went on learning more. At least, that is the only way in
which I can account for the wretchedness of some of your drawing, and
the badness of your perspective, when you have got so far as to have a
feeling for a scale of colour and the tone of a picture."

"Well, I suppose I can learn it all over again," said Rose, with a
mixture of spirit and doggedness, forcing herself not to betray further
resentment, and to swallow a little girlish weakness at the
uncompromising treatment she was receiving. What would May and Dora say?
But she durst not trust herself to think of them.

"Of course," answered Hester, opening widely a pair of singularly clear
keen eyes. "Do you think I should have taken the trouble to say as much
if I had thought otherwise?"

It was the one dubious compliment which Rose extracted, without meaning
it, from the fault-finder.

Hester's openly expressed desire was to be an artist out and out, to
live like an artist, not to be troubled with the hindrances and petty
restrictions of an ordinary woman's life, which she was tempted to
despise, to which, if she yielded at all in her mother's house, it was
with scarcely concealed reluctance and aversion. Very likely she had
only the most one-sided conception of the life she would have chosen.
Certainly her notions of Bohemianism were about as ingenuous as "little
May's" might have been; to go where art called her, to do what art
demanded of her, to be art's humble, diligent, faithful servant all her
days, without being held back and fettered on every hand by set meals,
obtrusive servants, changes of dress, the obligation to pay and receive
visits. The dream of her life was to get to Paris and have lessons in
one of the French studios, where she was led to believe women have as
good a chance of being well taught as men possess. She would prefer to
live with some young women students like herself _en fille_--a
modified--much modified version of _en garcon_. They would hire an
_etage_ in some cheap, convenient quarter, get the wife or daughter of
the _conciergerie_ to prepare breakfast and supper for them, dine at one
of Duval's restaurants work all day, and sleep the sleep of the
labouring woman at night. She said she knew quite well how such artists
were considered in Paris, that they were regarded as _vauriennes_, to
whom there was no occasion to pay the respect and consideration which
were reserved for the potent _mesdames_ and the _jeunes filles ingenues_
of society. But what had she to do with society? She belonged to the
great republic of art, and had infinitely more to occupy her than to
listen for what society would say. As to not being able to take care of
herself and behave so that the slightest indignity to her would never be
ventured upon, the bare mention of such a possibility was received by
Hester with a wrath which bordered on fierceness, and for the most part
silenced her opponents effectually. Any displeasure which Annie Millar
had displayed on a similar supposition was mild by comparison.

Hester was not an only child. Mrs. Jennings had sons, all in the army or
navy, the mother was proud to say; but none of them in those days of
competitive examinations and expensive living was high enough up in the
service to be able to help his mother. On the contrary, grown men, with
men's callings, as they were, they found themselves under the necessity
of taking help from her. There were also other daughters besides Hester
married to men in professions as unexceptionable as those of their
brothers-in-law, but neither were they in circumstances which could make
them feel justified in granting the smallest subsidy to Mrs. Jennings.
Only Hester toiled for her mother at every moment which she could take
from her studies and her natural rest. Yet the two women, who had dwelt
under the same roof since Hester's babyhood, who were united by the
strongest and most sacred tie, were without one taste in common, were
irreconcilably different in every mode of thought and impulse of
feeling, were only alike in each being well-intentioned and desirous of
fulfilling her intuitions and justifying her beliefs. Being wise, the
pair agreed to differ. But oh! the pity of it where aims, ideals and
standards, hopes and fears, were all equally wide apart.

Mrs. Jennings did not interfere with Hester's freedom farther than she
could help. Hester had her own engagements, her own circle of friends.

It may not surprise those who are acquainted with the various versions
of Hester Jennings to be met with in this generation, that she was a
red-hot radical in contrast to her mother's conservatism--well-nigh a
_communiste_, to whom woman's rights and wrongs meant a burning question
of the day, which, next to her love of art, came very near to her heart.
She was almost powerless to assist her sister women, so overworked was
she on her own account, but whenever she could snatch a moment half a
dozen clubs and societies claimed her for their own. She had really a
wide personal knowledge of the working-women of London, employed and
unemployed.

CHAPTER XIII.

MR. ST. FOY'S AND THE MISSES STONE'S.

There was a second and large portion of Rose's life which belonged to
her art classes, and to the classes in which she was one of the teachers
and not one of the taught. In the art classes Hester Jennings's
influence still dominated over Rose. In spite of Mr. St. Foy's
professional qualifications, for which Hester had vouched, he had not so
potent a personality as that possessed by one of his favourite pupils.
He was tall, thin, gentleman-like, and delicate-looking, with a habit of
languidly winking his eyes every second or two, as if they were weary of
the trying sights of this world. He was kind to Rose in his courteous
way, but she would not have been certain either of his ability to judge
her work or of his honest opinion of it, if it had not been for what
Hester told her.

There were fifty pupils among whom she and Hester ranked. These occupied
the desks, worked at the easels, copied from copies, from the round
or--height of promotion--from well-known models attached to the
institution. There was the old market woman who obligingly sat alike for
wicked old hags and doting grandmothers. There was the athletic young
porter, off duty, who was a brigand or a pilot as occasion served.

The pupils were of various styles, idle and chattering, picturesque and
sentimental, industrious, commonplace, but the most of them were
variations on that last accepted version of the lady artist--the
individual girl who aims at being independent and natural to the verge
of harmless lawlessness and Philistinism--strange reaction from
aestheticism. There were many Hester Jennings's though none so pronounced
as Hester.

The Misses Stone's select boarding-school carried Rose twice a week into
another region, where the wind did not blow so freely and the air was a
trifle stifling. Sometimes she wondered if the Misses Stone knew the
tone of a large proportion of the young lady artists at Mr. St. Foy's
classes--not that Rose herself could see anything absolutely wrong in
it--whether they would care to have an assistant drawing-mistress from
those half-emancipated, more than half insubordinate ranks. However,
Rose's appointment was not in any great danger of being cancelled. She
had involuntarily become doubly careful in her dress and demeanour
lately, and she discovered that the Misses Stone were old and intimate
friends of Mrs. Jennings, whom they pitied sincerely for having so
troublesome a daughter.

At first Rose did not dislike the office of teacher, which brought her
in a little income before she was out of her teens. The whole place
reminded her pleasantly of Miss Burridge's school which she had quitted
but recently, only instead of having a metropolitan superiority in
enlightenment and progress, strange to say, the Misses Stone's
establishment, as if drawing within itself and shrinking back from the
constantly moving, restlessly advancing world around, was really
older-fashioned, less in the van of public opinion than the school at
Redcross. The Misses Stone, their teachers and pupils, were well-bred,
and what might have been called in past days "prettily behaved," though
the behaviour was a little formal. Women and girls were elegantly
accomplished, in place of being solidly informed or scientifically
crammed, in accordance with the fashion of the nineteenth century. Above
all, they declined with a gentle unconquerable doggedness to be turned
from the even tenor of their ways. Italian was still largely taught in
the school, while only a fraction of the pupils learnt German. Latin had
no standing ground save in the derivation of words, Greek was unknown.
The word mathematics was not mentioned. The voice of the drill-sergeant
was not heard, but the dancing-master with his kit attended twice a
week, like Rose, all the year round. The harp was played by the pupils
instead of the violin. Withal there was much careful learning and
repeating of Sunday Collects and the Church Catechism.

The school found ample support. What it attempted to do was in the main
well done. Undoubtedly there was an attraction, half-graceful,
half-quaint, in all connected with it, from the gentle manners of the
elderly Misses Stone, who were only bitter against what was bold,
impertinent, and eccentric, to the most dainty of their small pupils.
Strictly conservative people felt that their daughters were safe in such
an atmosphere, and patronized it accordingly. Undoubtedly they learnt a
good deal which was worth learning.

Rose began by receiving nothing save the most considerate kindness and
approval in that house. It was a libel on its forms and ceremonies to
imagine that they contained anything tyrannical and harsh in their
essence. The very law of their being was amiability, combined with mild
steadfastness in withstanding the subversive attitude of the time. The
most highly-born, richly-endowed girl within the precincts--and the
school was rather aristocratic--would no more have ventured on being
rude to Miss Rose Millar, the junior drawing-mistress, than the girl
would have presumed to stamp her foot at one of the Misses Stone. If
Rose had dropped her pencil in the course of her work, the highly-born
pupil, by force of example, if for no other reason, would immediately
have risen and picked it up, though she might not have made the speech
about a Titian being worthy to be served by a Caesar. In fact Rose was in
danger of being killed with kindness. Soon she was conscious of
something choking, crushing, dwarfing in this artificial system. This
was made more conspicuous to her by the choice of art subjects for the
girls' study. There was no end of flower and fruit pieces. There were
the stereotyped noble ruins, and cottages, either embowered in roses or
half-buried in snow. There were the Dutch and Venetian boats which had
never sailed on familiar waters. Stags abounded, and Rose ceased to ask
why so many of them stood at bay. The sleeping baby, which might have
been a dead baby or a stone baby, was there; so was the long-nosed,
wooden-legged collie, watching the shepherd's plaid. With what a lively
hatred Rose grew to hate that collie!

Rose felt herself "cribbed, cabined, and confined" when she came from
the comparative open air and robust life of Mr. St. Foy's classes. Yet
even these were not the world of art. She got nervous in the fear of
unworthily committing solecisms against the silken softness and steely
rigidity of the Misses Stone's shrine. She thought if she caught up and
reproduced any of Hester's vagabond notes--the Misses Stone were
necessarily slightly acquainted with Hester, of whom, however, they
never spoke--it would be like throwing a bombshell among these quiet,
unalterable proprieties. She came to have a morbid, feverish craving to
do it, or to see some other person do it. For instance, if young Lady
Maud Devereux would but bid Rose tie her shoe, or even if she would
contradict Miss Stone, or Miss Lucilla, or Miss Charlotte, without
prefacing the contradiction by "I beg your pardon!"

At last these two days a week of giving lessons at the Misses Stone's,
from being merely the agreeable lucrative variety in her life which they
had promised to be, became gray days of penance to Rose Millar, when she
felt she was under a spell, and did her duty badly. She ceased to refer
to them in her letters home.

Rose arrived one morning at the Misses Stone's in a peculiarly excitable
and yet depressed frame of mind. She had not been to Mr. St. Foy's
classes that day; but Hester Jennings had known, the afternoon before, a
piece of unwelcome news which she thought fit to communicate to Rose in
the course of their morning walk, that ran so far in the same
direction. A group of peasants, with which Rose Millar had been taking a
great deal of pains, had been summarily condemned and dismissed by the
master. Rose waxed hot and restive under the sentence, and began to
dispute it vehemently, Hester defending it with equal vehemence, in what
she considered justice to Mr. St. Foy, on the ground of a lack of
dignity and repose in the central peasant. Hester was at that moment
tearing along a thoroughfare, and showing so little dignity and repose
not only in her gait, but in her "loud," ill-assorted garments, that, as
frequently happened, to Rose's vexation, several people among the
passers-by turned and looked after them. Hester to talk of a want of
dignity and repose! It was like Satan reproving sin.

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