are quite right, Minerva. Art is a despot. One has to give one's self
entirely up to him. To toil in his service, one devotes all the ideal,
all the energy, honesty, conscience, that one possesses, so that you
have none of these things left for real life, and the completed labour
throws you down, strengthless and without a compass, like a dismantled
hulk at the mercy of every wave. A sorry acquisition, such a wife!"

"And yet," the young man hazarded timidly, "it seems to me that art,
however exigent it be, cannot for all that entirely absorb a woman.
What would she do with her affections, of that need to love, to devote
herself, which in her, much more than in us, is the spring of all her
actions?"

She mused a moment before replying.

"Perhaps you are right, wise Minerva. It is true that there are days
when my life rings terribly hollow. I am conscious of abysses, profound
chasms in it. Everything that I throw in to fill it up disappears. My
finest enthusiasms of the artist are engulfed there and die each time
in a sigh. And then I think of marriage. A husband; children--a swarm of
children, who would roll about the studio; a nest to look after for them
all; the satisfaction of that physical activity which is lacking in
our existences of artists; regular occupations; high spirits, songs,
innocent gaieties, which would oblige you to play instead of thinking in
the air, in the dark--to laugh at a wound to one's self-love, to be
only a contented mother on the day when the public should see you as a
worn-out, exhausted artist."

And before this tender vision the girl's beauty took on an expression
which Paul had never seen in it before, an expression which gripped his
whole being, and gave him a mad longing to carry off in his arms that
beautiful wild bird, dreaming of the home-cote, to protect and shelter
it in the sure love of an honest man.

She, without looking at him, continued:

"I am not so erratic as I appear; don't think it. Ask my good godmother
if, when she sent me to boarding-school, I did not observe the rules.
But what a muddle in my life afterward. If you knew what sort of an
early youth I had; how precocious an experience tarnished my mind, in
the head of the little girl I was, what a confusion of the permitted and
the forbidden, of reason and folly! Art alone, extolled and discussed,
stood out boldly from among it all, and I took refuge in it. That is
perhaps why I shall never be anything but an ar