it! He does, I assure you.'

'Wilderspin in love with a model!'

'Oh, not _a la_ Raphael.'

'If you think Wilderspin to be in love with any woman, you little
know what love is,' I exclaimed. 'He is in love with his art and with
that beautiful memory of his mother's self-sacrifice which has
shattered his reason, but built up his genius. Except as a means
towards the production of those pictures that possess him, no model
is anything more to him than his palette-knife. Shall you be alone
this evening?'

'This evening I dine at Sleaford's. To-morrow I am due in Paris.'

Wilderspin, who had now entered the studio, seemed genuinely pleased
to see me again, and told me that in a few days he should be able to
borrow 'Faith and Love' of its owner for the purpose of beginning a
replica of it, and hoped then to have the pleasure of showing it to
me.

'I observed Mrs. Gudgeon in the hall,' said he to Cyril. 'To think
that so unlovely a woman should, through an illusion of the senses,
seem to be the mere material mother of her who was sent to me from
the spirit-world in the very depths of my despair! Wonderful are the
ways of the spirit-world. Ah, Mr. Aylwin, did it never occur to you
how important is the expression of the model from whom you work?'

'I am not a painter,' I said, 'only an amateur,' trying to stop a
conversation that might run on for an hour.

'It has never occurred to you! That is strange. Let me read to you a
passage upon this subject just published in _The Art Review_, written
by the great painter D'Arcy.'

He then took from Cyril's table a number of _The Art Review_, and
began to read aloud:--

It is a curious thing that not only the general public, but the art
connoisseurs and the writers upon art, although they know full well
how a painter goes to work in painting a picture, speak and write
as though they thought that the head of a beautiful woman was drawn
from the painter's inner consciousness, instead of from the real
woman who sits to him as a model. Notwithstanding all the technical
excellence of Raphael, his extraordinary good luck in finding the
model that suited his genius had very much to do with his enormous
success and fame. And with all Michael Angelo's instinct for
grandeur, if he had not been equally lucky in regard to models, he
could never adequately have expressed that genius. It is impossible
to give vitality to the painting of any head unless the artist h