"Then you are a fool," said the Bee-woman quietly. "There is no man living who would not give all that and give it with a smile, for his work. You are not a great artist."
"You are right, you are right," she moaned, "and I am not worthy. If colours are my weapons to win fame, how should I grudge them? I will give them up."
"Then indeed you are a fool," said the Bee-woman sternly, "for you throw away your most powerful weapon before the fight begins. You are not a great woman."
She fell with her face to the earthen floor and lay quiet, while the bees hummed outside the hut like the turning of a great wheel or the rocking of an old cradle.
"Then all that I have learned," she muttered at last, "is useless? All that I have worked and anguished for? All that I have saved even my suffering for, prizing it and never grudging, because it would help my work? No man could do more."
"You think so?" said the Bee-woman. "Get up, my child, and look out of the latticed window at the back of my cottage. Do not think what you see there is close before you, for the glass of that window has strange properties and the part of the wood which it shows you is far, far from here."
She raised herself and walked to the casement, shading her eyes with her hand, for a red glow struck the single pane and blinded her.
"Before you look," said the Bee-woman, "tell me if you remember that picture of yours which you think the best?"
"Do I remember it?" she repeated, "can I ever forget it? A year of my life has gone into it. The year that I was married."
[Illustration: The glass of that window has strange properties.]
"Do you think it worth that year?" said the Bee-woman.
"It could not have been done with less," she said.
"Now look," said the Bee-woman, "and tell me what you see."
She went to the casement, and it seemed as if the aged trees formed a long, long aisle out from it, narrow and bright, and at the end was a sunny glade.
"I see a young man," she said, "laughing and singing to himself in the sun."
"No, he is hardly more than a boy. His hair curls like a boy's. His face has never known a care."
"He is eating fruit and painting a picture on a white cottage wall. The children and the old men are watching him."