answered Elinor , hastily . `` You paint my face with your own fantasies . Well , come for me tomorrow , and we will visit this wonderful artist . '' But when the young man had departed , it can not be denied that a remarkable expression was again visible on the fair and youthful face of his mistress . It was a sad and anxious look , little in accordance with what should have been the feelings of a maiden on the eve of wedlock . Yet Walter Ludlow was the chosen of her heart . `` A look ! '' said Elinor to herself . `` No wonder that it startled him if it expressed what I sometimes feel . I know by my own experience how frightful a look may be . But it was all fancy . I thought nothing of it at the time ; I have seen nothing of it since ; I did but dream it ; '' and she busied herself about the embroidery of a ruff in which she meant that her portrait should be taken . The painter of whom they had been speaking was not one of those native artists who at a later period than this borrowed their colors from the Indians and manufactured their pencils of the furs of wild beasts . Perhaps , if he could have revoked his life and prearranged his destiny , he might have chosen to belong to that school without a master in the hope of being at least original , since there were no works of art to imitate nor rules to follow . But he had been born and educated in Europe . People said that he had studied the grandeur or beauty of conception and every touch of the master-hand in all the most famous pictures in cabinets and galleries and on the walls of churches till there was nothing more for his powerful mind to learn . Art could add nothing to its lessons , but Nature might . He had , therefore , visited a world whither none of his professional brethren had preceded him , to feast his eyes on visible images that were noble and picturesque , yet had never been transferred to canvas . America was too poor to afford other temptations to an artist of eminence , though many of the colonial gentry on the painter 's arrival had expressed a wish to transmit their lineaments to posterity by moans of his skill . Whenever such proposals were made , he fixed his piercing eyes on the applicant and seemed to look him through and through .
If he beheld only a sleek and comfortable visage , XXXXX there were a gold-laced coat to adorn the picture and golden guineas to pay for it , he civilly rejected the task and the reward ; but if the face were the index of anything uncommon in thought , sentiment or experience , or if he met a beggar in the street with a white beard and a furrowed brow , or if sometimes a child happened to look up and smile , he would exhaust all the art on them that he denied to wealth .
for if of on since than that though to with