ve drowned my heart,
because after I have done my work, which I cannot explain to you, I lie
in your arms and cease to think. Give me a son with your eyes, for I
shall never understand you._"

She crushed the paper in her hand and flung it out of the door of the
hut.

"Then he lied to me!" she said bitterly, "fool that I am!"

"If you had been a fool he would not have needed to lie to you," said
the Bee-woman. "But you are one of those for whom no price is too
great."

"Oh, oh!" she wept, "I am deceived! God and the world have deceived me!
But I will not be beaten. I will show him--and you--that I am not the
weak thing you think me. This very moment, if only I had the colours, I
could paint as never before. I feel it. The very pain will help me. If
only I had the colours!"

"There are always colours," said the Bee-woman, "if not of one kind,
then of another. But you cannot get them for nothing."

"I will pay any price," she said.

"Will you take the crimson from the blood of your cheeks?" said the
Bee-woman. "Will you take the fresh blue from your eyes, the ivory
white from your teeth, the ruddy gold from your hair, and the thick
softness of it for brushes? Will you?"

She shuddered.

"I know what you mean," she said, "but oh, it is hard! I--I cannot."

"Then you are a fool," said the Bee-woman quietly. "There is no man
living who would not give all that and give it with a smile, for his
work. You are not a great artist."

She wrung her hands.

"You are right, you are right," she moaned, "and I am not worthy. If
colours are my weapons to win fame, how should I grudge them? I will
give them up."

"Then indeed you are a fool," said the Bee-woman sternly, "for you throw
away your most powerful weapon before the fight begins. You are not a
great woman."

She fell with her face to the earthen floor and lay quiet, while the
bees hummed outside the hut like the turning of a great wheel or the
rocking of an old cradle.

"Then all that I have learned," she muttered at last, "is useless? All
that I have worked and anguished for? All that I have saved even my
suffering for, prizing it and never grudging, because it would help my
work? No man could do more."

"You think so?" said the Bee-woman. "Get up, my child, and look out of
the latticed window at the back of my cottage. Do not think what you see
there is close before you, for the glass of that window has strange
properties and the part of the wood which