dmiration
of an artist for the beauty of a stranger. Since she had had neither
hand nor say in her own making, the results were neither to her credit
nor against it. For success in her chosen line she would have exchanged
her beauty very willingly for a plain mask, her glorious youth for a
sedate middle age. She would have given perhaps an eye, an ear, or so at
least she thought in this ardent and generous period of early beginnings
and insatiable ambition. In her thoughts nothing seemed to matter to
her but art.

There was no sustaining pleasure in the fact that her father had given
in to her. Opposition--unspoken, it is true, but not to be
mistaken--remained in his attitude toward her. He found indirect means
for conveying his idea and that of her friends that she was wasting
herself upon a folly, and was destined, if she persisted in it, to only
the most mediocre success. An exhibition of her works, undertaken with
the avowed wish to know "just where she stood," had been discouraging in
its results. The art critics either refused to take her seriously or
expressed the opinion that there were already in the world too many
sculptors of distinguished technique and no imagination whatsoever. Her
friends told her that she was a "wonder." And there were little
incidents of the farce which caused her to bite her lips in humiliation.

That the critics should be at the pains of telling her that she was
without imagination angered her, since it was a fact already better
known to herself. And in one moment she would determine at all costs to
prove herself an imaginative artist, and in the next "to chuck the whole
business." But she could not make up her mind whether it is worse for a
captain to wait for actual defeat or, having perceived its
inevitability, to surrender. To go down with colors flying appeals
perhaps to noble sides of man; but it is a waste of ships, lives,
and treasure.

Passing swiftly down the avenue, she did not know whether, upon arriving
at her studio in McBurney Place, she should get into her working-apron
or make an end, once and for all, of artistic pursuits. But with the
lifting of the legless beggar's face to hers, all doubts vanished from
her mind like smoke from a room when the windows and doors are opened.
Whatever his face might have revealed to another, to her it was Satan's,
newly fallen, and she read into it a whole wonder of sin, tragedy,
desolation, and courage; and knew well that if she co