[30] It hurt the faithful soul even now to recall how, when the sketches came from the West, her mistress had eagerly examined them, and bitten her lip, her eyes glistening. "There's the true touch, Eliza," she had said quietly. "This boy has a spark of the divine fire." "Pooh! I don't think so at all," Eliza had returned stoutly and contemptuously. "Of course, that drawin' of his mother is pleasant enough, but you haven't seen her in years. You don't know how good the likeness is; and as for that landscape, that rough twisted tree most blown off its feet and clouds racin' above those rocks, nobody'd ever think they was anything except just what they are, a tree and rocks and clouds; awful pokerish, I call it, not a bit pretty." Eliza's long nose lifted in scorn. Mrs. Ballard smiled and bowed her head over the wind-blown tree. "My flesh and blood, still," she murmured. Now, in the dreary days, Eliza moved about aimlessly, forgetting to eat, and roused only by Pluto's indignant meows, to remember that, though he might mourn, still he felt that he owed it to himself to keep his coat glossy by milk baths, taken internally. [31] [31] Never had he known such long luxurious naps in the lap of his mistress as now. Wrapped in thought she sat for hours without moving; the irrepressible tears welling up from her heart and creeping, one by one, down her thin cheeks. She had made no friends in the cheap apartment building where they lived. It was a changing population, which ebbed and flowed at the mercy of its own financial tide. "There ain't a lady in this house except you," Eliza had been wont to say to her mistress. "I don't believe we know that," Mrs. Ballard had rejoined; "but we're too busy for neighboring, aren't we, Eliza?" Whenever there had been any leisure, Mrs. Ballard had taken her handmaiden to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not for worlds would Eliza mar the joy with which her mistress bestowed upon her this treat. So she climbed endless stairs, and plodded weary miles with fortitude, having ready a response to every worshipful utterance with which Mrs. Ballard pointed out this and that marvel. "Wonderful, ain't it!" Eliza would respond with the
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