Book Three The Joy of Sunshine Chapter 6 Love Is Nothing!

Monday, Jan. 20.

Dear me! Beauty is a responsibility! Such troubles, such trials about nothing! It's photographs this time!

Last Wednesday--the day after the papers published so much about me--a strange man called in Mrs. Baker's absence and begged me to let him take my photograph--as a service to Art. If Aunt had been at home I wouldn't have been permitted to see him. But the man was pleasant and gentlemanly, and so sincere in his admiration that he won the way to my heart. I'm afraid devotion is still so new to me that it's the surest road to my good graces. He hesitated and stammered, blinking before my shining loveliness as if blinded, as he offered to take the pictures for nothing, if he might exhibit them afterwards; and at last I went to his studio, though I said that his work must be for me only, and that I must pay for it.

I wonder at myself for yielding, for I didn't mean to have any photographs until the experiment was quite finished--to mortify me in future with their record of imperfection; but I'm so nearly perfect now that, really, it's time I had something to tell me how I do look. Of course, as fast as I can lay hands on them, I'm destroying every likeness of the old Nelly. At the studio it was such a revelation--the care and intelligence the man displayed, the skill of the posing--that when I got home full of the subject and found Cadge waiting, I had to tell her all about it.