Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/77

A Puritan Bohemia be my wife if I did not think that your work would be all the better for your coming to me. Looking at it impersonally it seems to me that you are making a great mistake."

"It isn't very modest in you to say so," murmured Anne, turning away from the steady gaze of his blue eyes. "No, I cannot do it. I haven't any feelings. I have only a Puritan conscience that has turned its attention to art."

"You are attempting," he continued, "to interpret human life by painting pictures of faces. How can you understand when you know so little about life? You have plenty of theory. You know how they paint portraits in Paris, and how they paint them in New York. But you know little of the experience that makes faces worth painting. A human face is a record of a whole life. How can you read there the traces of love and joy and sorrow until you know what love and joy and sorrow are?"

"I'll be a symbolist," said Anne