delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the
reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the
wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling
and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the
Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the _Edinburgh
Review_, will always be associated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet
heroine of the most sombre of sex-tragedies.

"Why do you call me Beatrice?" she asked, with that sudden darkening of
those luminous eyes. He told her:

"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Shelley used to be my
favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years
ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini
Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done
justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried."

"I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. "I have always loved and
pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in
Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go
out into the world----"

"To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. "Tell me who they are?"

She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and
there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.

"They are women, and girls, and children," she answered him. "They are the
most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the
slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless,
dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up,
and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it."

There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his
ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had
fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her
eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging
Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his
fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening
as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by
a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and
pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing
knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the
jungles. Less vile of life, even in