The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton by Robert J. Begiebing

and showed me the appropriate sections. “But do not forget his essential principle for students: parts must be studied before attempting to combine a whole.”
    He looked directly at me. “And one thing more. There is a freshness in your work, Mrs. Fullerton,” he added, “and a vigor you’ve heard me praise. That is your luck: not to have had such qualities crushed out of you by academy training. But there is a harsh innocence as well. And this innocence is that over which you must learn to prevail.”
    Mr. Spooner was always honest with me on every count. I respected him for that. He had about him a lack of humbug and of inflated bon homi such as I had never seen in a public man before. And as Julian had said of a similar quality in his work: “Mr. Spooner is that rarity—an artist whose powers and beauties come from deep beneath the surface of a painting, and cannot be faked, as if they were mere techniques or afterthoughts.”
    Julian had been speaking out of despair over his own inability to acquire that deeper beauty, but I recognized the merit in his point immediately, and I saw that it was these deeper qualities that I myself hoped to discover by my relation to Mr. Spooner. Yet I had come to worry myself about Julian’s progress as well. Here was a young man of talent whose ambitions, barring some revolution in his mode of life and thought, would likely come to naught. For despite his promise and ability, there was some flaw in his constitution that worked continually, as Fitz Lane had warned him, against his own best interests. It was not that he produced insufficient work. His work was adequate to maintain his way of living and to stave off the opprobrium of Mr. Spooner. And thereby he realized some snail’s progress, I believe, in the essentials.
    Yet he filled many of his vital hours with every conceivable manner of distraction from his work—or with every mere appurtenance to the central work. “My dear Julian,” Mr. Spooner once said to him, “you dress as if you had no talent!” And what prodigious goings and comings among his brilliant circle of friends—too many of whom were mere attitudinizers and promenaders, flirtatious posturers in love with the idea of being artists (but not with the patience and labor) and whose work proved withal predictable and lifeless. What vivacious teas and evening parties; what lengthy conversations and gossipings; what debates on chiaroscuro, depth of tone, and sauciness of color; what concert-goings and gallery musings and attendances at theatrical performances; what eternal walkings about the multitudinous city; what wine-samplings and convivial gatherings of every sort: all these, I say, comprised his gaggle of fondest distractions.
    Yet Julian had a deep desire to paint, that sting of the Muse’s serpent, so to speak, and a true visual gift. Moreover, his ambition for fame and accomplishment seemed unlimited.
    How sad then to witness that absence of personal discipline which opened the poor, dear man to every one of these temptations which I have enumerated, and to more which I have not. He seemed to exist in an ether of hopefulness that the skies would some day open and a bolt of divine, righteous lightning would strike close enough to catapult him into the first rank of artistic reputations in the eyes of the world.
    I T WAS ABOUT THIS TIME , however, during the late summer of 1838, that I began once more to have feelings, or certain aperçus , that I was being watched. I could not account for them this time either, and Tom thought I had grown unnecessarily apprehensive, so I brushed such feelings aside. Surely neither my uncle nor Joseph Dudley, nor their agents, could have followed us into the teeming city to single me out.
    Moreover, I was busy with commissions, meeting other artists through Julian—like Fitz Lane, his friend from Gloucester and a wonderful lithographer—and engaged in my