It was an
attitude to close the soul.
"But you should care for life," she said, in her very gentle way. "Do the
best you can with your own work, but work like this should, above
everything else, make you care for life."
The girl moved impatiently. "You don't understand. I guess you are not an
artist," and she rose and went away.
Ernestine smiled a trifle, but the strange little interview had opened up
a long vista. The girl represented, in extreme measure, but
fundamentally, the professional attitude. Most artists saw work in
relation to themselves. Pictures were either better or worse than they
could do. They came to the great things like these, seeking something,
usually some mechanical device, to take away to their own work. She could
see so plainly now the shallowness of that.
Her own mood had changed,--broken. Perhaps it was the consciousness that
she too had been seeing it in relation to herself, or it may have been
but natural reaction. The big uprising was dying down; the heat of the
passion had passed; it was all different now, and in the wake of her
brimming moment there came the calm that follows storm, the sadness of
spirit which attends the re-enthronement of reason, but also the
understanding, far-seeingness, which is the aftermath of great passion
like that.
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