‘Yes, one lives a full life at such moments. That reminds me that at this season daylight rapidly departs. May I not see your pictures now?’
‘With pleasure, such as they are,’ she answered, rising, and pushing an easel round, so as to show the picture in the best light.
‘This is but a sketch,’ said he, standing before it. ‘Have you nothing finished?’
‘N—no,’ said Sara, pausing; and as she forced herself to make the calculation, she found that she had never finished anything since her visit to Ems; since she had known Jerome Wellfield.
‘I have finished nothing lately,’ she exclaimed, struck with the thought, and involuntarily speaking out her reflections. ‘I finish nothing now. I begin things, and then the impulse fades away, and they are neglected.’
‘It is as well not to insist upon working out every crude attempt,’ he said—and she thought his face took an expression of gravity, as he continued to look at the sketch—‘because if you do that, you are not an artist any more, but a machine; but it is also well occasionally to persevere in carrying out some conception, even if you do not find yourself altogether in sympathy with your first idea. That is discipline, which in moderation is good. What is this?’ he added, so drily, and so abruptly, that she started.
‘That?’ she answered, a little hurriedly; ‘oh, it was a verse from a little poem of Sully Prudhomme’s which struck my fancy. Where is it?’
She found a scrap of paper on the edge of the easel, on which paper were scribbled Sully Prudhomme’s exquisite little lines, Si vous saviez. The verse she had tried to illustrate was the one running:
‘Si vous saviez ce que fait naître
Dans l’âme triste un pur regard,