Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/126

118 "Why don't you give up?"

"Because," murmured the girl, touching the crossed feet of the warrior, "I haven't worked and planned and hoped for that all my life. I have something else to do."

"You might do your work better."

"Don't say that. It is commonplace, and besides, it isn't true. You can learn better by seeing and not sharing. Your feeling of the beauty and the worth and the hurt of things is all the keener for the sense of lack. What man wants is better in art than what man has."

"Queer sentiments for a realist," remarked Mrs. Kent.

"There is a kind of irony about the whole thing, if you are right. Those who have the experience can't use it in art, and those who pursue art haven't the experience. The two are indispensable and incompatible. Anyway, I am not like that."

"Like what?"

"The cold-blooded young woman who worships an art-ideal and crushes her heart.