“I don’t think I agree with you,” she said, giving a shove to her soft elastic hair which did not improve the indefiniteness of the parting. “Of course it’s unsatisfactory in one way to feel one will never live to finish things, but in another way I think it’s a great comfort to feel one can never use them up or outlive them if one lasts on to be a hundred. And though one gets very cross and miserable with failing so over things one works at, I don’t know whether one would be so much happier when one was at the top of the tree. I’m not sure that the chief pleasure isn’t actually in the working at things—I mean in the drudgery of learning, rather than in the triumph of having learnt.”
“There’s something in that,” said Clement. And it was a great deal for Clement to say.
It does not take much to convert me to Eleanor’s views of anything. But I do think experience bears out what she said about this matter.
Perhaps that accounts for my having a happy remembrance of old times when we worked at things together, even if we failed and cried over them.
I know that practically, now, I would willingly join the others in going at anything, though I could not promise not to be peevish over my own stupidity sometimes, and if I was very much tired.
I don’t think there was anything untrue in my calling the times we went sketching together happy times—in spite of what Clement says.
But he does rule such very straight lines all over life, and I sometimes think one may rule them too straight—even for full truth.