Mrs. Tully laughed heartily and shook her head.
“He endowed it for them,” she gasped, her hand to her side. “Or partially endowed it, or something. I don’t know what the arrangement was. And within the month it was raided by the police for an anarchist club.”
After having learned the wide scope of her interests and talents, Graham was nevertheless surprised one day at finding Paula all by herself in a corner of a window-seat, completely absorbed in her work on a piece of fine embroidery.
“I love it,” she explained. “All the costly needlework of the shops means nothing to me alongside of my own work on my own designs. Dick used to fret at my sewing. He’s all for efficiency, you know, elimination of waste energy and such things. He thought sewing was a wasting of time. Peasants could be hired for a song to do what I was doing. But I succeeded in making my viewpoint clear to him.
“It’s like the music one makes oneself. Of course I can buy better music than I make; but to sit down at an instrument and evoke the music oneself, with one’s own fingers and brain, is an entirely different and dearer satisfaction. Whether one tries to emulate another’s performance, or infuses the performance with one’s own personality and interpretation, it’s all the same. It is soul-joy and fulfilment.
“Take this little embroidered crust of lilies on the edge of this flounce—there is nothing like it in the world. Mine the idea, all mine, and mine the delight of giving form and being to the idea. There are better ideas and better workmanship in the shops; but this is different. It is mine. I visioned it, and I made it. And who is to say that embroidery is not art?”
She ceased speaking and with her eyes laughed the insistence of her question.
“And who is to say,” Graham agreed, “that the adorning of beautiful womankind is not the worthiest of all the arts as well as the sweetest?”
“I rather stand in awe of a good milliner or modiste,” she nodded gravely. “They really are artists, and important ones, as Dick would phrase it, in the world’s economy.”