“Do you think, my dear,” said he, “that I’m such a dry stick of a man as not to want you for your great self—your great, splendid, and wonderful self? I want you with everything in me.”
She turned half aside and said gently;
“That’s all a woman wants, Ephraim.”
“What?”
“To be wanted,” said Clementina.
It was not till the next day that she told Tommy the great news. She took him for a walk and broke it to him bluntly. But he was prepared for it. Etta had foreseen and had prophesied to his sceptical ears. He murmured well-bred congratulations.
“But your painting,” said he, after a while.
“It can go hang,” said Clementina. She laughed at his look of horror. “Art for the polygamous man and the celibate woman. A man can throw his soul into his pictures and also attend to his wife and family. That’s out of a woman’s power. She must choose between her art on the one side, and husband and children on the other—I’m telling you this, mon petit, for your education. I’ve chosen husband and children as any woman with blood in her veins would choose. It’s the women without blood that choose art—don’t make any mistake about it. Now and then one of ’em chooses the other—and, as she doesn’t get any children and doesn’t know what the deuce to do with a husband, falls back on her art again and gives the poor devil soup with camel-hair brushes floating about it and a painting-rag for a napkin, and then there are ructions, and she goes among her weary pals and says that their sex is misunderstood and down-trodden, and they must clamour for their rights. Bosh!”
She sniffed in her old way. Tommy insisted.
“But you’re a born painter, Clementina. A great painter. It means such a tremendous sacrifice.”