lf physically----"

"I eat," Vina said, looking bored and helpless at the thought. "I eat
and I do enough physical work to tire a stone-mason----"

"But I can see through you to the bone! I think you only imagine you
take nourishment. Oh, Vina, I know your life--handling huge hard things
and making them lovely with pure spirit. I must take better care of
you. Tell me all about it, if it will help."

"Beth, please don't talk about pure spirit, meaning me. I used to be
able to stand it, but not any more. The Grey One does that. I seem to
suggest it to flesh and blood people.... I'm sure he didn't see me so.
He looked at me, as if to say, oh, I don't know what!... I wish I
_were_ fish-cold! I'm all overturned.... I just met Mary McCullom on
the way over."

Beth had forgotten the name for the moment. She thought Vina was about
to tell her of Bedient.

"Don't you remember Mary McCullom, who tried painting for awhile,
painted one after another, discolored and shapeless children, wholly
bereft and unfortunate children?"

"Oh, yes," said Beth. "I heard she had married----"

"That's just it.... Do you remember how she used to look--pinched,
evaporated, as one looks in a factory blue-light? I remember calling
upon her, as she was giving up her last studio. We sat on a
packing-case, while they took out her pictures, one child after
another, foundlings which had come to her, and which no one would take
nor buy----"

"Vina, you're cruel to her!"

"Listen, and you'll see whom I'm cruel to.... I remember telling her
that day what a fearsome, ineffectual thing art is anyway.... How
spooky thin she looked, and her face was yellow in patches! My heart
was wrung with her, the image of a little woman with no place, no heart
to go to, all her dreams of girlhood turned to ghosts, fit only to run
from. Then she admitted that she might marry, that a man wanted her,
but her wail was that she was mean and helpless, a failure; as such it
was cowardly to let the man have her, hardly a square thing for a girl
to do. Well, I perked her up on that.... She took him; I don't even
know him by sight, but he's a man, Beth Truba! Mind you, here was a
woman who said she was so dismayed and distressed and generally bowled
over by living twenty-seven years, that she hadn't the heart left to
love anybody. But he took her, and he's a man----"

"That seems to charm you," Beth ventured. "'He took her, and he's a
man.'"

"It does, for I just left he