tion seriously, "Oh, as
for that part; it could be managed with perfect safety." Then, suddenly,
he turned his eyes upon her face, with a gaze so sharp and piercing that
the blood slowly colored neck and cheek.

But the painter did not wait for the blush. He had seen what he wanted and
was at work--with the almost savage intensity that had marked his manner
while he had worked upon the portrait of Sibyl Andres.

And so, day after day, as he painted, again, the portrait of the woman who
Conrad Lagrange fancifully called "The Age," the artist permitted her to
betray her real self--the self that was so commonly hidden from the world,
under the mask of a pretended culture, and the cloak of a fraudulent
refinement. He led her to talk of the world in which she lived--of the
scandals and intrigues among those of her class who hold such enviable
positions in life. He drew from her the philosophies and beliefs and
religions of her kind. He encouraged her to talk of art--to give her
understanding of the world of artists as she knew it, and to express her
real opinions and tastes in pictures and books. He persuaded her to throw
boldly aside the glittering, tinsel garb in which she walked before the
world, and so to stand before him in all the hideous vulgarity, the
intellectual poverty and the moral depravity of her naked self.

At times, when, under his intense gaze, she drew the cloak of her
pretenses hurriedly about her, he sat before his picture without touching
the canvas, waiting; or, perhaps, he paced the floor; until, with
skillful words, her fears were banished and she was again herself. Then,
with quick eye and sure, ready hand, he wrought into the portrait upon the
easel--so far as the power was given him--all that he saw in the face of
the woman who--posing for him, secure in the belief that he was painting a
lie--revealed her true nature, warped and distorted as it was by an age
that, demanding realism in art, knows not what it demands. Always, when
the sitting was finished, he drew the curtain to hide the picture;
forbidding her to look at it until he said that it was finished.

Much of the time, when he was not in the studio at work, the painter spent
with Mrs. Taine and her friends, in the big touring car, and at the house
on Fairlands Heights. But the artist did not, now, enter into the life of
Fairlands' Pride for gain or for pleasure--he went for study--as a
physician goes into the dissecting room. He justifie