"Ah, but the work, the beautiful work!" cried the painter.
"Well, as for me, do you know, I've come to believe that my work is just
living--for a time anyhow."
"Well, then, the fame!" cried the painter.
"I don't seem to care for the fame."
It had gone much like that with her music. She had a fine voice, and her
New York teacher had told her over and over that she "must go on." She
had been pleased with his praise and had worked hard for a time. Then
she had gone to him, too, one day, open-eyed and inquiring.
"Go on to what?" she had asked.
"Why, to glory," the singer had said.
She had shaken her head, unconvinced. "I don't seem to care for the
glory," she had said. And beyond learning to use her voice well she
would not work with it. "It is not that I am lazy," she had protested to
the singer, "but I couldn't get what's in life for me out of it by
singing."
"What's in life for you?" queried the singer, interested, for the girl
was beautiful and rich and aspirant.
"Ah, I don't quite know yet," said the girl, the pretty pathos of youth
and waiting upon her, "but some day I shall find myself; then I shall
know."
All through her college days she had been looking for herself. When the
time had come that she had gone to Elsie Gossamer's house to visit, and
there had met men--college boys at first and later on men of a larger
world--she had still been looking for herself. But though in the
meantime she had learned how to meet men and how to treat them--capably,
Elsie Gossamer said--she had not found herself. During the past summer,
since her return from college, she had idled on here through a little
interim with her father, comfortable, dreamy, waiting, seeking. But she
had not found herself.
As she began to make ready for bed that Sunday night she had, suddenly
and subtly, a quiver of consciousness that the waiting and the seeking
were nearly over. Just how she knew it she could not have told, or just
what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of
knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength
and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach
of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the
straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl
could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant
health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood
before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung
over her shoulder, her body assumed a rare natural poise, classically,
ancestrally beautiful, Grecian. By and by she roused from the little
reverie before the mirror, put out the light, and came over to the
window.
"Oh," she cried at once, "that was what was the matter with me, that was
why I felt that something was about to happen! It was the storm!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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