Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/190

182 hands. Once again life was like wine upon her lips in the joy of creating. For days she had been toiling with her brushes, painfully conscious of herself. Now had come one of the divine moments when work and worker are one. For other people there were other ways of escape. This was hers.

The winter and its perturbations seemed very far away. Now that its troubles were all over and nothing personal greatly mattered, the old inspiration was coming back. Hope and fear and regret made only a kind of mental atmosphere in which the one reality of Anne's life, her art, stood out in soft relief.

"If I can only keep out of my own way," she murmured, "I can do something."

Even the disillusionment of success had ceased to pain. To have expected satisfaction from anything external had been childish. In no flippant sense was it true that the thing one has is not the thing one wants. Truly one never reaches any place without finding that the place is not