It was not a sentimental relation that grew up between them. How could it be when everybody said there was "no sentiment in Ben Shaw, or even in his pictures"? They were never known to raise any clamor concerning their "kinship of souls" and all the usual sentimental etcetera. They liked each other, and took "solid comfort" in the companionship that made that summer's sketching so much pleasanter than had sketching ever been for either of them before. That was all.
It was not very long before he very naturally took the place of teacher and she of pupil, for it was an open secret that she aspired to higher art than still life, while he, although not six months her senior, had been longer a student than she. Simpletons that they both were, they grappled audaciously with the purple, gold-filtered, ever-elusive and brooding mystery of the distant hills, and struggled with the infinite suggestiveness of the great, awful sea. They came home every night from both grapple and struggle with canvases as expressive of the mighty influences they had labored with as a child's fairy-tale hints at the divine splendor of mystery of the book of Revelation, and sat down to their supper of cold beef and doughnuts believing they feasted on ambrosia and nectar, and lived as divinely as were those not Massachusetts but Thessalian hills. How insolent is youth, and how foolish, to us who have outlived it!
Unsymmetrical as this friendship was--that is, so dwarfed on the sentimental side--there was one of those two silly mortals who thus fooled themselves with the fancy that this was Olympus and their green apple-sauce honey of Hymettus who would not have changed places with the divinest divinity of all the immortal host.
As one moon after another waxed baby-faced and then pined away to a wan shadow the friends became more inseparable than ever. And, behold! seeing these things, all the masculine boarders and the "girls" of the manor-house looked at each other obliquely with an expression that consorts best with paganism and pig-tails, while the lady-boarders smiled with that exasperating significance which when given to one's own affairs makes one yearn for the smiler's scalp. But in spite of these oblique glances and significant smiles, in spite of everything indicative of the contrary, they were not an atom in love with each other.