tle paint when this suited his genius best. The gauze of the gown
where it blended with the background at the edge of the line of arm was
so thin, seemingly made by a single brush-stroke, that it almost showed
the canvas.

A purpose in that gauze: The thinness of transparency of character! The
eyes of the portrait alone seemed deep. They were lambent and dark,
looking straight ahead inquiringly, yet in the knowledge that no answer
to the Great Riddle could change the course of her steps in the blind
alley of a life whose tenement walls were lighted with her radiance. You
could see through the gown, through the flesh of that frail figure, so
lacking in sensuousness yet so glowing with a quiet fire, to the soul
itself. She seemed of such a delicate, chaste fragility that she could be
shattered by a single harsh touch. There would be no outcry except the
tinkle of the fragments. The feelings of anyone who witnessed the
breaking and heard the tinkle would be a criterion of his place in the
wide margin between nerveless barbarism and sensitive gentility.

"I give! I give! I give!" was her message.

For a long time, he had no measure of it, Jack sat studying the portrait,
set clear in many scenes of memory in review. It had been a face as
changeful as the travels, ever full of quick lights and quick shadows. He
had had flashes of it as it was in the portrait in its very triumph of
resignation. He had known it laughing with stories of fancy which she
told him; sympathetic in tutorial illumination as she gave him lessons
and brought out the meaning of a line of poetry or a painting; beset by
the restlessness which meant another period of travel; intense as fire
itself, gripping his hands in hers in a defiance of possession; in moods
when both its sadness and its playfulness said, "I don't care!" and
again, fleeing from his presence to hide her tears.

It was with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw
his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of
her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its
beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey;
believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding
gloriously that it had only brought him nearer to her.

After he had been to his room to dress he returned to the same chair and
settled into the same reverie that was sounding depths of his being that
he had never suspecte