Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/76

68 "Let me see it!" cried Anne. "It looks hungry and fierce. What big eyes it has! It is a kind of composite of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf."

She gave it back.

"I ought to have taken that away from you," she said lightly. "The young woman in fiction always gets her picture back and burns it."

"We're not in fiction," sighed the young man. "I sometimes wish we were. No, you can't have it, Nannie. Tell me: is there anything except your theory about work that stands between us?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"Why you think you can work better for a maimed and incomplete life I don't see!" he exclaimed. "A man doesn't make up his mind that he can't live his life and do his work too. He knows that his life will be better for the work, and his work for the living."

He saw his advantage and pursued it.

"I never asked you to give up your art. I care too much about you to want you to