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oman, the stalk of asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-pricks and to sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain--sin for which he held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for his great transcendent heart. Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and surveyed it with folded arms. "She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk from warm udders in cowslip time, and I--I brought her to my cobwebbed life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others--curse them!--they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said--ay, for milk absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint from the loathly atmosphere of my world--of the world that had been mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back--cringed to her. She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"--a shuddering horror stifled his voice--"till, by chance, I came on _that_." I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his shoulder. "Well, old man, you must clear out of this. Come along with me back to the Bush, and drop this nightmare." "Drop it?" he flouted; "why, the world reeks of it!" "Not now. You say that even the priests absolve you." "Cheap contrition! cheap absolution! how one cuddles them at first--at first! But in time we feel our canker--it grows under the clean Church wrappings--in time we learn that where our sanctuary is, there, alone, can our penance be. Hence this picture. It accompanies the portrait, a gift to the nation. You can't think what a going down on the marrow bones it was--down on the stones for every rascal to gaze and prod at, an attitude for eternity." "You'll come to Australia?" I repeated, adhering obstinately to my matter-of-fact bent. "As you please. I feel clean enough for your company now, for I have committed suicide--not vulgarly, by murdering myself, but suicide spiritually. I have given up the ghost by working out the pitch through the point of my brush, and the carcass is yours to bury where or how you will." In a Cornfield (Dialogue). (_The field is divided by a stile and a hedge from some pastures._) HE (_bent double in the act of gathering poppies_). And what would you vote about? SHE
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