so industrious; you will never have to find fault with me again."

"Nonsense--a woman that sells fish in the streets!"

"But you have not seen her. She is beautiful, her mind is not in fish;
her mind grasps the beautiful and the good--she is a companion for
princes! What am I that she wastes a thought or a ray of music on me?
Heaven bless her. She reads our best authors, and never forgets a word;
and she tells me beautiful stories--sometimes they make me cry, for her
voice is a music that goes straight to my heart."

"A woman that does not even wear the clothes of a lady."

"It is the only genuine costume in these islands not beneath a painter's
notice."

"Look at me, Charles; at your mother."

"Yes, mother," said he, nervously.

"You must part with her, or kill me."

He started from his seat and began to flutter up and down the room; poor
excitable creature. "Part with her!" cried he; "I shall never be a
painter if I do; what is to keep my heart warm when the sun is hid, when
the birds are silent, when difficulty looks a mountain and success a
molehill? What is an artist without love? How is he to bear up against
his disappointments from within, his mortification from without? the
great ideas he has and cannot grasp, and all the forms of ignorance that
sting him, from stupid insensibility down to clever, shallow criticism?"