Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/120

112 Kent, my work does not suffer much. And I have made a deliberate choice. I simply cannot bury myself in art dreams in a world so full of suffering and ignorance and crime."

"I don't see," said Anne crossly, from her corner, "why I've always been cursed with a desire to do my own work. Life is so short, and the evenings come so soon. How can we be acquitted if we do other people's tasks, and leave undone our own? It seems to me as if nowadays everybody is so bored with his own life that he wants to live somebody else's life."

"Oh," cried Helen. "Don't say that!"

"It isn't that," said Howard. "People are just trying to forget their own demands."

"A deliberate determination to forget yourself amounts to a deliberate determination to remember," Anne remarked sententiously. "I suppose that I am mean and selfish and unenlightened," she added, clenching her little hand; "but I'd rather be able to paint well those wrinkles around