"How dare you say so, you?" she cried. "What do you know of art or the great world of cities beyond this horrible wood? What are you?"

"They call me the Bee-woman, in this part of the wood," she answered, "but I have many duties. What are yours?"

"I have told you," she said sullenly, for under the other's eyes her own fell.

"Not so," said the Bee-woman quickly,[Pg 20] a hand on her shoulder, "you have told me only your pleasures. I do not ask you for what you would sacrifice food and sleep—though you seem unable to go without either for very long—but for what you should sacrifice them?"

[Pg 20]

She clasped her hands and faced the Bee-woman proudly.

"Art is the one thing in this world that makes these two the same," said she, "to the artist his art is both his pleasure and his duty."

"That is the reason that artists are not women, then," replied the Bee-woman, "for their duties cannot be their pleasures very long or very often."

At this she would have run away, but her knees were still weak, and the thought of the trackless woods stopped her heart a moment with fear.

"A Bee-woman may know much of bees," she said coldly, "but the world beyond this wood has a wider space to overlook, and while you have been growing[Pg 21] old in the wood, mother, the humming of your charges has stopped your ears to the voices of the young who fill the world outside. They would tell you, if you could understand, that Art is the one word that is one for men and women."

[Pg 21]

"My child," said the Bee-woman, "so long as bees hive and trees root in the earth there will be no such word. For the words of the world were made to match the things of the world, and that is so in this wood and out of it."

She looked at the Bee-woman and felt troubled and on the eve of something great and sad.

"You are no common peasant woman, I am sure," she said gently, "and indeed, I have heard wiser and more travelled persons than you say very much the thing that I think you mean. But like you, they were old."

"That is to say, that they had seen more of the life 

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