"The design might be improved; but I don't think those suggestions would do it." "They're mine," said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a dreamy remoteness of tone--his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.
"I supposed so," said Alma, calmly.
"Oh, mah goodness!" cried Miss Woodburn.

"Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah?
Well, Ah'm glad Ah'm not an awtust--unless I could do all the talking." "Artists cannot tell a fib," Alma said, "or even act one," and she laughed in Beaton's upturned face.
He did not unbend his dreamy gaze.

"You're quite right.

The suggestions are stupid." Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: "You hear?
Even when we speak of our own work." "Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!" "And the design itself ?" Beaton persisted.
"Oh, I'm not an art editor," Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant evasion.
A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and iron-gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room.

Beaton knew the type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the illustrated papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond.