Was it a portrait of Pon-Pon? Angry with herself Angela
tried to put the hateful but insinuating thought away from her,--it
was the first slight shadow on the fairness of her love-dream,--and
it was like one of those sudden clouds crossing a bright sky which
throws a chill and depression over the erstwhile smiling landscape.
To doubt Florian seemed like doubting her own existence. She put the
"Phillida" picture back in the portfolio and paced slowly to and fro
in her studio, considering deeply. Love and Fame--Fame and Love! She
had both,--and yet Aubrey Leigh had said such fortune seldom fell to
the lot of a woman as to possess the two things together. Might it
not be her destiny to lose one of them? If so, which would she
prefer to keep? Her whole heart, her whole impulses cried out,
"Love"! Her intellect and her ambitious inward soul said, "Fame"!
And something higher and greater than either heart, intellect, or
soul whispered to her inmost self, "Work!--God bids you do what is
in you as completely as you can without asking for a reward of
either Love or Fame." "But," she argued with herself, "for a woman
Love is so necessary to the completion of life." And the inward
monitor replied, "What kind of Love? Ephemeral or immortal? Art is
sexless;--good work is eternal, no matter whether it is man or woman
who has accomplished it.
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