Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/191

A Puritan Bohemia there. The worn ideas came to the girl with the poignancy of a new experience. She had—all she wanted—a chance to work on. In store for her were perhaps keener insight, greater skill, a firmer grasp on the real meanings of things.

A spray of ivy outside the window blew out into the sun. Its beauty brought quick tears to Anne's tired eyes. For all that the artist missed there was compensation in the added preciousness of little things. Surely, in a world so prodigal of life, there was a place for the mere watcher. Among people who squandered experience so recklessly there was room for one whose task was to record.

It was a limited life, but one need not suffer all in order to understand. He who "raised the walls of man" made them not altogether opaque. Oh, people did not know how keen the taste of another's experience might be! For some, the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table have made a liberal feast. Here was the eternal paradox of art, to feel