This Proud Heart by Pearl S. Buck Page B

long time. There roughly was his own face, and he recognized it.
    “What shall I do for you?” he asked.
    “Teach me what I must know,” she begged him.
    He put down the lump and began to move among his own figures, so much larger than he was.
    “A woman!” she heard him muttering in a whisper. “Damn, damn, damn, that it’s been given to a woman!” He stopped and turned on her and stared at her furiously.
    “You’re strong, anyway,” he said. “You look as strong as a man.”
    “I am,” she said.
    “You’ve got to be—and stronger,” he said, and pulled a frowsy brown tweed cap out of his pocket. “Well, come on!” he shouted.
    “But where?”
    “Wherever you keep your things,” he said. “I’ve got to see something more than that abominably cast head. I’ll have to teach you from the ground up. Look here, you’ve got to learn how to do it all yourself, casting, everything. They all think they’re too grand for that nowadays. They shape out their little bits of models and they pat out little lumps of mud and send them off to be finished! I don’t! My stuff is mine from beginning to end. That’s why it’s what it is.”
    “I haven’t done anything to show you,” Susan said.
    “You must have done something,” he roared and jerked off his cap and put it in his pocket again.
    “No, I haven’t,” she said miserably. She forgot all the rooms she had swept, the meals she had cooked, the beds she had made. She forgot Mark and John, and she said at last, “I’ve made two small things, a head and a child, and both are unfinished.”
    He pulled his cap out of his pocket again and flung it on his head.
    “All this delay!” he muttered, and stalked out of the room, and she followed him.
    There at the bottom of the steps was a small very dirty car, and he clambered in and waited an instant until she was beside him and then with a frightful clatter of gears they were rushing down the drive and up the road toward her own house.
    What time it was she did not know, and it did not matter. When she opened the front door, her mother was asleep in the living room, her magazine upon the floor. She led the way past her and upstairs. From the nursery she could hear John calling to be taken up, but she went on to the attic. Behind her came tramping heavy footsteps. He was panting a little as she opened the door to the empty room. She swept her arm about its emptiness.
    “You see I have done nothing,” she repeated.
    But he did not answer. He went up to the child, curled in its primeval shape and now covered with dust, and stared at it for a long time, and said nothing. Then he went to Mark’s head, and took off the cheesecloth covering.
    “Ha!” he said, after a moment, “you didn’t get that.”
    “No,” she said.
    “You tried to make it from life.”
    “Yes.”
    “Maybe there wasn’t enough to make,” he said. “It’s a queer thing that you can’t make anything in our trade unless there’s something permanent to be made.”
    She could not answer, not being able to say, “It’s my husband.” But it did not matter to her at this moment who it was.
    He turned away abruptly and said, staring at her, “Look here, I’m going to Paris at the end of the summer. You’d better arrange to go with me. Meanwhile come to me twice a week. Begin tomorrow.”
    Still she could not speak. For he was commanding her to the impossible, which she knew she must perform.
    “Don’t come down,” he added, and tramped to the door, and there he turned again and looked about the empty room.
    “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said. His voice was cold and his red-brown eyes were angry. Then he was gone.
    She could hear John’s voice, now turned to wailing. She ran down into the nursery and picked him up from his crib and held him. But he could not at once be consoled for neglect. He cried loudly, and soon she heard her mother’s hurried step on the stair and the door opened.
    “Why, you’re