He continued to lecture her in his bitter strain. Her head ached over conflicting thoughts, and she wished he would leave her. “Not that we shouldn’t try!” he threw out, at last, as a sop to her prejudices. “But try, my young lady, in a way that our lordly race is too impatient to suffer.”
“What do you mean?” She fancied that he had a new theory of training to suggest.
“Learn something. Not pose in the ridiculous belief that our genius will create a universe all for ourselves. New experiments, new inventions in education and art,—we patent ’em by hundreds,—as if one could invent the strands of a cable that anchors the ship.”
Miss Anthon followed him eagerly; now the comforting definite word was to be spoken. “And I personally? what am I to do?” she asked insistently.
“You are an ignorant young person.”
She nodded humbly.
“After learning a little French and German, less Latin, in some place where they have lectures and go about in caps and gowns, you went to an art-school for a year or two. In the place you called a college, you were taught a little advanced algebra and a survey of European history; perhaps some lackadaisical young man taught you to ‘love’ Tennyson and Browning. Now, chance having brought you to Europe, you undertake ‘art’ in the same fashion of godlike heedlessness.”
Miss Anthon winced and then laughed. “That’s about so,” she admitted.
“And really all you want out of ‘art’ or anything else is amusement, and—gratification for your vanity.”
“You think that is all? Well, you have taken the—the—”