"
"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. Miss Woodburn
hardly needed to say, "May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co'nel
Woodburn, Mr. Beaton?"
The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle,
slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: "I am very glad to
meet you, sir; happy to make yo' acquaintance. Do not move, madam," he
said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to
the chair beyond her; "I can find my way." He bowed a bulk that did not
lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she
had let drop out of her lap in half rising.
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