It was easy to imagine her home after that; what was worse, it was easy, too, to imagine her future.
She seemed to have tired of being examined now, and turned around to one of the sketchers.
“Why do you paint girls?” she inquired of the corpulent Hans.
“Hm! Because they’re pretty.”
“Why don’t you paint war, or red clouds like those there?” She pointed to a landscape opposite her.
“Because I’ve never seen a war.”
“But red clouds you’ve seen surely. I’ve seen much handsomer ones than those; they don’t really burn.”
It was an impressionistic canvas; darkness creeping along the ground, darkness leaping up to meet one from the fields, and in the midst of the fading red off in the distance a lonely shivering poplar, the one thing that rose above the plain, cutting like a sword against the sky proudly and tragically. As the girl looked at it her pupils widened, contracted and widened and trembled; she had understood it at once, and her face became fixed by the sorrow of the picture.
“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it hard to learn to paint?”
“That depends. Can you draw?”