She hesitated. "I hope it will be a great picture."

"Tell me about it."

"I can tell you better, dear, when it is a little farther along."

"You love your work, Ernestine. You have the real, true, fundamental love for it. I always loved to see your face light up when you spoke of your work. Is your face lighted up now?" he asked, a little whimsically, but earnestly.

She laughed, but the laugh caught in her throat.

"Will you tell me about your picture as it progresses, dear? Don't be afraid to talk to me of your work, Ernestine. Things will be less hard for me, if I think you are happy. And it will be good to know there is to be some great thing come of our love, dear. I want something to stand for it, something beautiful and great."

"There will be!" she said pa.s.sionately. "There is going to be."

"I know," he said gently. "I am sure of it."

He stroked her face lovingly then. He loved so to do that.

"Will you mind much, Karl," she began, a little timidly, "if I am away from you some this year?"

"Away from me?" he asked, startled. "Why, what do you mean, Ernestine?"

"Oh, not that I am going away," she hastened. "But, as I say, I am going to begin my work on Monday, and part of the time I shall be working, away from home."

"You mean in some studio?"

Her face grew troubled; she frowned a little, bit her lip, but after a second's hesitation, answered: "Yes."

"Found some fellow to study with?"

And again she answered yes.

"Well now look here, liebchen, have I been such a brute that you thought I wouldn't want you to set foot out of the house? I didn't suppose there was anyone here you'd have much to gain from, but if there is, so much the better. I want you to go right ahead and do your best--don't you know that?"

But there was a note of forced cheer in it. It would be hard for Karl to feel she was not in the house, when he had come to depend on her for so many things. She could not tell him why she was willing to be away from him. It hurt her to think he might feel she did not understand.

A little later Georgia and her mother and Georgia's Mr. Tank came over to see them. During the summer Ernestine and Karl had been bestowing an approving interest on Georgia and Joseph Tank. Karl liked him; he said the fellow laughed as though there was no reason why he shouldn't. "He doesn't know everything," he told Ernestine, "but knows too much to seem to know what he doesn't."

Georgia had been disposed to be apologetic about Mr. Tank's paper bags, and Karl had retorted: "Great Scott, Georgia, is there anything the world needs much worse than paper bags?"

To-night Mr. Tank was all enthusiasm about a ball game he had attended that afternoon. He gave Karl the story of the game in the picturesque fashion of a man more eager to express what he wishes to say than to guard the purity of his English. "Oh, it was hot stuff, clear through,"

he concluded. "Bully good game!"

"It is sometimes almost impossible for me to tell what Georgia and Mr.

Tank are talking about," sighed Mrs. McCormick. "They use so many words which are not in the dictionary. Now when people confine themselves to words which are in the dictionary, I am always able to ascertain their meaning."

"I'm long for saying a thing the way I can get it said," laughed Tank.

"And I'm long for this new spelling. I never could get next to the old system, and now if they push this deal through, I can pat myself on the back and say, 'Good for you, old boy. You were just waiting for them to start in right.' It would be such a good one on the teachers who b.u.mped my head against the wall because I didn't begin pneumonia with a p and every other minute run in an i or an e I had sense enough to know had no business there at all. Oh, I'm long for taking a fall out of the old spelling book."

"I do hope, Karl," admonished Mrs. McCormick, "that you will use your influence with scholars to see that the dictionary is let alone. It is certainly a very profane and presumptuous thing to think of changing a dictionary,"--turning to Ernestine for approval.

"When I was a child," observed Georgia, "I had a sublime and unquestioning faith in two things,--the Bible and the dictionary. The Bible was written by G.o.d and the dictionary by Noah Webster, and both were to remain intact to the end of time. But the University of Chicago is re-writing the Bible, and 'most any one who feels like it can take a hand at the dictionary, so what is there left for a poor girl to believe in?"

"Believe in the American dollar," said Tank cheerfully. "That's the solidest thing I've ever been up against."

Mrs. McCormick left them to call upon a friend who lived next door, Karl and Mr. Tank turned to frenzied finance, and Georgia and Ernestine wandered away by themselves--Ernestine surmised that Georgia wanted to talk to her.

"How goes it at _The Mail_?" she asked.

"Oh--so so," said Georgia fretfully. "Newspaper work is a thankless job."

"Why, Georgia, I thought you loved it so."

"Oh, yes,--yes, in a way, I do. But it's thankless. And you never get anywhere. You break your neck one day, and then there's nothing to do the next, but start in and break it again. You're never any better to-day for yesterday's killing. Now with you--when you paint a good picture, it stays painted."

"Why don't you get married?" asked Ernestine, innocently.

"Married! Pooh--that would be a nice thing!"

"Indeed it would. If you care for the man."

Georgia was fidgeting; it was plain she wanted to talk about marriage, if she could do so without seeming to be vitally interested in the subject.

"I mean it, Georgia," Ernestine went on. "If you care for him, marry him."

"Care for whom?" Georgia demanded, and then coloured and laughed at the folly of her evasion. "Well, the fact of the matter is," she finally blurted out, "I don't know whether I do or not. Now, in a way, I do. That is, I want him to care for me, and I shouldn't like it if he sailed away to the Philippine Islands and never showed up again, but at the same time--well, I don't think even _you_ could get up much sentiment about paper bags, and besides"--tempestuously--"the name Tank's preposterous!"

Ernestine laughed. "What are those terms the lawyers are so fond of--immaterial, irrelevant, and something else? Georgia, once when I was a little girl and went to visit my grandmother, I had a stubborn fit and wouldn't eat any dinner because the dining-room table had such ugly legs.

And the dinner, Georgia, was good."

It was Georgia who laughed then. "But Ernestine"--with a swift turn to seriousness--"you're not a fair sample; you and Karl are--exceptional.

You see you have so _much_--intellectual companionship--sympathetic ideas--kindred tastes--don't you see what a fool I'd make of myself in judging the thing by you?"--she ended with a little gulp which might have been a laugh or might have been something else.

Ernestine was giving some affectionate rubs to her bra.s.s coffee pot. When she raised her head it was to look at Georgia strangely. She continued to look, and the strangeness about her intensified. "Shall I tell you something, Georgia?"--her voice low and queer. "Something I _know_? You wouldn't be willing to fight 'till you dropped for sympathetic ideas. You wouldn't be willing to lay down your life for intellectual companionship.

You wouldn't be willing to go barefoot and hungry and friendless for kindred tastes. Don't for one minute believe you would! The only thing for which you'd be willing to let the whole world slip away from you is an old-fashioned, out-of-date thing called love--just the primitive, fundamental love there is between a man and a woman. If you haven't it, Georgia--hold back. If you have,"--a wonderful smile of understanding glowed through a rush of tears--"oh, Georgia, if you _have_!"

CHAPTER XXVII

LEARNING TO BE KARL'S EYES

She wondered many times in the next few months why she had put it in that very simple, self-evident way.

For there are things harder than to go barefoot and hungry and friendless. Those are the primitive things, to be met with one's endowment of primitive courage, elemental strength. But poise of spirit can not be wrested from elemental courage. To carry one's carefully wrapped up burden with the nonchalance of the day--nature forgot to make endowment for that; it is something then to be worked out wholly by one's self.

Persecution she could have endured like a Spartan; but it was almost unendurable to be tolerated. She was sure it would have been easier if only they had been rude to her. To be openly jeered at would fire her soul. But there was so little in their manner either to kindle enthusiasm or stir aggressiveness. She began to think that the most trying thing in the world was to have people polite to one.