have had some great sorrow. It is an unhappy love-affair. I
understand." Here he smiled his critical, unfathomable, remote smile.
"You are not yet eighteen, and have been capable of a great sorrow!
Child," he said, "thank God for it! You have a voice of gold. We will
make of that sorrow diamonds and rubies and pearls to set in the voice,
so that the world will stand at gaze before you. When you have real
insight you will know that nothing was ever taken from us that more was
not put in its place."

"Master," she said, with something of his own abruptness, "may I talk to
you a little, a very little, about myself?"

Already Josef realized the charm of her companionship as well as the
adoring humility with which her eyes shone into his and the
unquestioning way she placed herself under his direction. He nodded his
permission with a smile.

"I want to be taught in _everything_. I know so little. It is not book
studies I mean. I want to learn to be bigger, to think great thoughts. I
want, most of all, to develop the power to be happy, to make the people
around me happy. _Most_, I want"--she drew up her chest and made an
outward gesture with her arms, a gesture significant of her whole nature
in its indication of courage and generosity--"I want," she repeated, "to
grow soul!"

Josef laughed aloud. "Ah," he cried, "you funny, little, unusual thing!
I'm glad you've come to me. We will study, study, _and grow soul
together_, you and I. We will not accumulate facts to be laid on
shelves, like mental lumber, but grow bigger thoughts: see ourselves and
people clearer that the work may be broadened. And we will find our
ideals changing, changing, getting bigger, higher. And the little people
will fall away from us, like Punch-and-Judy shows, painlessly, with kind
thoughts, because we will have no further use for them. Wait! Trust the
master! Nothing makes one forget like a great art! In three--four years,
you will meet the man, and say: 'Ach, Heaven! is it for this I suffered?
Stupid me! Praise God things are as they are, and that I still have
Josef.'"

"I have thought sometimes," Katrine went on, "that men have many fine
traits, which, without becoming masculine, women might study to acquire.
I remember once I went to spend the day with a boy and a girl whose
mother punished them both for some slight misdemeanor. Afterward the
girl cried all the rest of the morning, but the boy went out and made a
swing, and in a little whil