Signor Conti leaned over her one day, speaking kindly phrases in broken English about the new attempt she was making.
"Don't! don't, please!" she said, on a sudden impulse. "Understand that at least I _know_ it's bad."
"Oh, it will be better," he answered, gently.
"No," she said, very low, "it will never be much better. I've waited too long."
"You must not feel discouraged." He leaned lower and spoke under his breath. "You may yet find great happiness by means of your art."
She shook her head, and when she could steady her voice said:
"Yes. The first was for one of your temperament to come to a great noisy class like this. You cannot do your best work here. This is not the place for you."
"You can work under some artist alone, some one who can give you more time. I tell you, you have talent, a _bello ingegno, signorina_."
She looked up with a gleam of hope shining through tears.
"You--_you_ are too busy. I'm afraid you don't receive pupils at your own studio," she said, timidly.
"No, I do not receive pupils as a rule; but I will receive you, signorina."
That was the end of lessons at the Cooper Institute, and the beginning of the brief, but best, happiness Valeria's life was to know.
Some indiscreet allusion to the change in a letter Valeria or her brother had written to their mother brought Mrs. Gano in hot haste to New York again. She found Valeria a different being--but she also found Signor Conti and a lonely studio in a side street, where her daughter worked alone with this foreigner, modelling "the members of the human body," while the sculptor worked on his "Lady at the Bath." It was all unspeakably objectionable and un-American. This was no fit _milieu_ for a Gano. It wasn't a seemly place for any lady. Valeria must come home. She told her so the same night. No, Valeria could not do that.
"Why? Are you so attached, then, to this Italian image-maker?"
Valeria went home to the West the next day. The following winter she died.
Little Val was nearly seven when she woke up one morning and was told that the baby had died in the night. Then it was true, this thing she had heard about people dying. Her excitement and curiosity were infinitely greater than her sorrow. Had he gone to heaven yet? No, he was in the cold, uninhabited "best" room, where nobody but strangers--guests and grandmothers--had ever slept. She made Nanna hurry through the bath and dressing. The nurse was crying. Val observed her critically.