_ PART ONE
CHAPTER VII. ERNESTINE IN HER STUDIO
The next morning she went to work. She had never wanted anything with quite the eagerness that she wanted to work that morning.
"What I want to know is," Georgia had demanded the night before, "did either of you do any work? I hear a great deal about quaint little villages and festive cafes, but what did you actually do?"
Now if Georgia were only here to repeat the question, she could answer jubilantly: "What did I do? Why, I got ready for this morning! Wasn't that a fine year's work?"
It had seemed queer at first. "Why don't I work," she would ask Karl, "now that I am here where I always wanted to be?" But Karl would only laugh, and say that was too obvious to explain. Once he had talked a little about it. "I wouldn't worry, liebchen. Isn't it possible that the creative instinct is being all used up? It's your dream time, sweetheart. It's your time to do nothing but love. After a while you'll turn to the work, and you'll do things easily then that were hard to do before."
How had he known? For nothing had ever been more true than that. She knew this morning that she could do things easily now which had been hard to do before.
One of the very best things about this curious, old-fashioned house was that it had an attic which had all the possibilities of a studio. Just a little remodeling--and Paris itself could do no better.
To that attic she turned just as soon as Karl had gone over to the university. Her things had been carried up; now for a fine morning of sorting them out! But instead of attacking the unpacking and sorting and arranging she got no farther than a book of her sketches. Sitting down on the floor she spread them all around her.
Despite the fact that she had not at once settled down to serious work, she made sketches everywhere, just rough, hasty little things--"bubbles of joy" she called them to Karl. It seemed now that these were counting for more than she had thought. Everything was counting for more than she had thought!
Something of the joy of it carried her back to the days when she was a little girl and had had such happy times with her blackboard. The thought came that now, out of her great happiness, she must pay back to the blackboard all that it had given her in those less happy days. Work was but the overflow of love!
During the last five months, when Karl had been working in Paris, she had studied with Laplace. He had taken her in at once, rejoiced in her and scolded her. One day in an unguarded moment he said she knew something about colour. No one remembered his ever having said a thing like that before. And Ernestine had seen a teardrop on his face when he stood before her picture of rain in the autumn woods. That teardrop was very precious to her. It seemed she could work years on just the memory of it.
So there were many reasons why she felt like working this morning. All the loving and the living and the dreaming and the thinking and the working of a lifetime! Karl had understood. Her dream time! She loved that way of putting it. Beautiful days to be cherished forever! How rich she was in the things she had known! How unstinted love had been with her! She wanted now to give with that same largeness, that same overwhelming richness, with which she had received. Enthusiasm and desire and joy settled to fixed purpose. She began upon actual work.
She kept at it until late in the afternoon. She had never had such a day, and the great thing about it was that it seemed a mere beginning, just an opening up. A new day had dawned; a day which meant, not the death of the dream days, but their reincarnation into life. Those hours when she sat idly beneath blue skies, looking dreamily out upon beautiful vistas it seemed she should have been painting--how well, after all, they had done their work! Dreams which she had not understood were making themselves plain to her now. The love days were translating themselves in terms of life and work. She wanted to glorify the world until it should be to all eyes as the eyes of love had made it to her.
Laplace had said once it was too bad she had married. She thought of that now, and smiled. She was sorry for any one who thought it too bad she had married!
And then Karl telephoned. Would she come over to the university? He had been wanting to show her around, and this would be a good time. She dressed hurriedly, humming a little song they had heard often in Paris. _