The coast of Bohemia Author:William Dean Howells Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VI. Lcdlow went back to New York and took up his work with vigor and with fervor. The picture of the County Fair, which ho exhibited at the American Artists',... more » ran a gauutlet of criticism in which it was belabored at once for its unimaginative vulgarity and its fantastic unreality; then it returned to his studio and remained unsold, while the days, weeks, months and years went by and left each their fine trace on him. His purposes dropped away, mostly unfulfilled, as he grew older and wiser, but his dreams remained and he was still rich in a vast future. His , impressionism was somewhat modified; he offered his ! palette less frequently to the public; he now and then permitted a black object to appear in his pictures; his purples and greens were less aggressive. His moustache had grown so thick that it could no longer be brushed up at the points with just the effect ho desired, and he suffered it to branch straight across his cheeks; his little dot of an imperial had become lost in the beard which ho wore so conscientiously trimmed to a point that it might be described as religiously pointed. He was now twenty-seven. At sixteen Cornelia Saunders had her first love- affair. It was with a young man who sold what ho called art-goods by sample — satin banners, gilt rolling- pins, brass disks and keramies; ho had permitted himself to speak to her on the train coming over from the Junction, where she took the cars for Pymantoning one afternoon after a day's shopping with her mother in Lakeland. It did not last very long, and in fact it hardly survived the brief stay which the young man made in Pymantoning, where his want of success in art-goods was probably owing to the fact that ho gave his whole time to Cornelia, or rather Cornelia's mother, whom he found much more conve...« less