Page:Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark.djvu/388

 told them off on his fingers,—"your whistling-posts! You have n't done so badly. We 've backed you as we could, some in our weakness and some in our might. In your dark hours—and you 'll have them—you may like to remember us." He smiled whimsically and dropped the score into the trunk. "You are taking that with you?"

"Surely I am. I have n't so many keepsakes that I can afford to leave that. I have n't got many that I value so highly."

"That you value so highly?" Fred echoed her gravity playfully. "You are delicious when you fall into your vernacular." He laughed half to himself.

"What 's the matter with that? Is n't it perfectly good English?"

"Perfectly good Moonstone, my dear. Like the ready-made clothes that hang in the windows, made to fit everybody and fit nobody, a phrase that can be used on all occasions. Oh,"—he started across the room again,—"that 's one of the fine things about your going! You 'll be with the right sort of people and you 'll learn a good, live, warm German, that will be like yourself. You 'll get a new speech full of shades and color like your voice; alive, like your mind. It will be almost like being born again, Thea."

She was not offended. Fred had said such things to her before, and she wanted to learn. In the natural course of things she would never have loved a man from whom she could not learn a great deal.

"Harsanyi said once," she remarked thoughtfully, "that if one became an artist one had to be born again, and that one owed nothing to anybody."

"Exactly. And when I see you again I shall not see you, but your daughter. May I?" He held up his cigarette case questioningly and then began to smoke, taking up again the song which ran in his head:—