How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of large size she had covered with drawings.
I turned over the leaves of the book before us. Academic studies, principally of the human figure. Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so forth. Limbs from statues. Hands and feet from Nature. What a superb drawing of an arm! I don't remember it among the figures from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly. From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!----
----Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up the drawing-book with a lock on it.----Yes,--she said.--I should like to see her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock, which proved to be fast. We are all caricatured in it, I haven't the least doubt. I think, though, I could tell by her way of dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders. Some of them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem to notice it much. Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor more than on anybody else. The young fellow John appears to stand second in her good graces. I think he has once or twice sent her what the landlady's daughter calls bó-kays of flowers,--somebody has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had, which must have come from the divinity-student. It had a dreary title-page, which she had enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory, apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are "good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The gentleman with the "diamond"--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap. He pulls his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never sees him, as it should seem. The young Marylander, who I thought would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present one. But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her locked drawing-book.