Читать книгу At the Sign of the Fox. A Romance онлайн

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“What is it, M. Lorenz?” Brooke had asked, smiling at his serious air; “no one ever tells me anything definite but you. The master says, ‘Good! keep on!’ One friend only grunts; some one else says ‘Pas mal.’ I know that I must work, work, work, but what do I most lack?”

Lowering his eyes almost to the grass itself, he spoke rapidly, as if the telling was a pain to him: “You have not yet had the awakening; for it you must wait; it is the same with me, but I may not dry my brushes to wait for the day, only work, and destroy, and work again, come good, come ill. It is not enough to block the form and lay on the colours truly. Unless you can interpret your vision and see its shadow on the canvas, watch it draw breath, move, and speak to you, you can never create. But first of all you must know and feel, even if you suffer. How can you interpret this woman before you? Never could you paint for what she stands. Try children, animals, anything else—or better, dry your brush and wait!”

Brooke had flushed angrily and answered curtly; even now the memory brought colour to her cheeks. Only once again had she seen Lorenz before leaving, and now two years had passed. What had become of him? There were depths in this woman’s nature that her parents, all devotion in their different ways, had never fathomed, of which her friends of every day had never dreamed; and in one of these secret places, all unconscious to herself, this man had gained sufficient place at least to bar all others.