About this story
Four years of art study in Philadelphia bring you home with a medal, a father hoping you will settle, and a mother wanting vindication by proxy — plus a raffle that turns your best painting into a bazaar prize. A year later in a Paris atelier, the master Lucien praises your friend Nadie's work and calls yours merely "ladylike," leaving you to decide whether admiring art is the same as making it.
How it opens
At fifteen, you read beyond the school list and quoted Rousseau in an English composition.
Your mother told you that Miss Kimpsey had called while you were out and reported the alarming name.
Mrs. BellShe forgot the rest of your sentence but remembered enough to fear the book that supplied it.
Then she has judged the author, the quotation, and me from the one part she did not forget.
Mrs. BellDevelopment requires freedom, though your freedom might occasionally explain its destination.
Choose
It expressed a claim I intended to dispute in the next paragraph.
I wanted to discover which ideas Sparta forbids before examining them.