"It didn't come out as well as you hoped?"
"Of course not. Does anything ever? But it's the best that I can do. And I shall never do anything better."
"Nonsense."
"I shall never even try. I want to recover all the things I've thrown away, and put them back in my head and heart where they belong, and just live."
"Well," said her father, smiling, "if you feel that way, why that's a good way to feel. But I'm afraid art is stronger in you than you think. Just now you're tired and disillusionized. In a month you'll be making sketches for some monumental opus."
"If I do," said Barbara, "it will be executed here at Clovelly. I never want to leave Clovelly. I feel safe here, safe from myself and other people. I think," and she smiled whimsically, "that I should almost like to settle down and make you a good daughter."
"A good daughter," said the surgeon, "marries; and her father builds a beautiful house for her, just over the hill from his own--remember the little valley where we found all the fringed gentian one year?--and the shortest cut between the two houses is worn bare and packed hard by the feet of grandchildren. Good Lord, my dear, what's the good of art, what's the good of science? I would rather have watched you grow up than have made the Winged Victory, or discovered the circulation of the blood. Come now? Barbs, tell me, who's the young man?"
For the first time in her life she told him of the wild impulsiveness and the shocking brevity of her affections for various members of his sex; naming no names she explained to him with much self-abasement (and a little amusement) that she was no good, "A nice wife I'd make!" she concluded.
But her father only laughed. "The only abnormal thing about you," he said, "is that you tell the truth. The average girl shows men more attentions than men show her. I don't mean that she demonstrates her attentions; but that she feels them in her heart. To be absolutely the first in a woman's heart a man must catch her when she's about three months old."
"But a girl," said Barbara, "who thinks she's sure and then finds she isn't, hurts the people she's fondest of. In extreme eases she breaks hearts and spoils lives."