This Proud Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Well! I don’t understand—Most people—”
    She lifted her head suddenly and sniffed.
    “The steak’s burning!” she cried. “That’s not very wonderful of me!” She ran to push it hissing upon the plate. He could not tell whether she was laughing or crying.
    “I’m hungrier than I have ever been in my life,” she cried gaily. They were busy over the food, almost at ease with each other now, in the candlelight.
    “So am I, you darling,” he said.
    They were almost real again, but not quite. She thought, pondering upon his eyes, “It’s just this flickering candlelight that makes them so shadowy that they seem empty. They aren’t really empty. I love him so. He’s my husband.” Outside of her loving him, beyond this being of a woman, married to Mark, that was she, her busy brain went on talking to itself. “That head looks exactly like him now. Perhaps I’ve done the best I can with it—perhaps it won’t come to life. Perhaps I can’t make life. I wonder if I can be a real sculptor?”
    Ah, yes, but she would make life, she said resolutely. They rose and sat together on the little porch overlooking the lake while he smoked his pipe. They sat very closely in silence, realizing at last each other’s presence.
    “This is the beginning,” she whispered.
    “The beginning of our life,” he answered.
    In the moonlight and the silence they grew clearer to each other, closer. The individual color faded out of their faces, their eyes, their flesh, and some closer outline appeared. She felt his being, breathing, warm, expectant and shy.
    “Now for the lake,” he said suddenly. They undressed in the moonlight and there were their two bodies, white as marble. He was like a statue of marble. He would be cold as marble to touch. But she also was like marble, she thought, looking down at her own body, and she was not cold. He stood motionless, gazing at her, and she felt him, cold with shyness.
    “Come!” she cried. “Let’s run to the lake.”
    For she wanted life and movement in their two white carved bodies. They ran, hand in hand, and leaped and swam out into the lake together. They swam out and then in again to the beach. He was shivering.
    “It’s too cold,” he said. “Let’s build the fire.”
    They ran back to the cabin and barred the door against the night and the darkness of the woods, and he piled up the logs in the fireplace, and she knelt and lit the dry kindling, and the fire blazed. They knelt before it a moment, and then she felt herself drawn to her feet against him, her head pressed back to meet his kiss. And yet in that one instant before his kiss came down to still it, her brain drew aside from her and said to itself quickly, “There—that’s the look I need for the mask. He’s come to life.”
    The unfinished head stood in the attic which she planned sometime perhaps to make into a workroom for herself. But as yet she had no feeling of need for a room for herself alone. This was her home, this small house at the end of the street where she had played as a child. Looking out of its front windows she saw what had been familiar to her all her life, the rows of small white houses, the green of the campus at the far end, and out of the tops of trees the cupola of the main hall of the university where her father taught and where she and Mark had gone for four years. She had at once loved and despised it, knowing it to be small and provincial, and limited by its trustees who were two successful farmers, a lawyer and the president of the town bank, and yet loving the fierce raw-boned quarrelsome poverty-stricken faculty, each of whom she knew not only as the dogmatic passionate person who taught her, but as the person, too, of whom her father growled, as he did of Professor Sanford, after faculty meetings, “That fellow Sanford’s a crank. I don’t care how good he is in astronomy. He can’t see anything but stars.”
    Poor Professor Sanford! It was quite true he lived among the