Very well, then, what was Penelope inspired to do when she became Mrs. Beresford and left the Atlantic rolling between the beloved Salemina, Francesca, and herself? Why, having "crossed the sea and back" repeatedly, she found "the sit-fast acres" of the house of Beresford where she "left them" and where they had been sitting fast for more than a hundred years.
"Here is the proper place for us to live," she said to Himself, when they first viewed the dear delightful New England landscape over together. "Here is where your long roots are, and as my roots have been in half a hundred places they can be easily transplanted.
You have a decent income to begin on; why not eke it out with apples and hay and corn and Jersey cows and Plymouth Rock cocks and hens, while I use the scenery for my pictures? There are backgrounds here for a thousand canvases, all within a mile of your ancestral doorstep."
"I don't know what you will do for models in this remote place,"said Himself, putting his hands in his pockets and gazing dubiously at the abandoned farm-houses on the hillsides; the still green dooryards on the village street where no children were playing, and the quiet little brick school-house at the turn of the road, from which a dozen half-grown boys and girls issued decorously, looking at us like scared rabbits.
"I have an idea about models," said Mrs. Beresford.
And it turned out that she had, for all that was ten years ago, and Penelope the Painter, merged in Mrs. Beresford the mother, has the three loveliest models in all the countryside!
Children, of course, are common enough everywhere; not, perhaps, as common as they should be, but there are a good many clean, well-behaved, truthful, decently-featured little boys and girls who will, in course of time, become the bulwarks of the Republic, who are of no use as models. The public is not interested in, and will neither purchase nor hang on its walls anything but a winsome child, a beautiful child, a pathetic child, or a picturesquely ragged and dirty child. (The latter type is preferably a foreigner, as dirty American children are for some reason or other quite unsalable.)