study of his idol's features had a remarkable effect upon Frederick.

The flatness of her forehead, her eyebrows, the setting of her eyes, the
turn of her temples, the shape of her ears and the twist they took where
they joined her head, her nose as narrow as the dull edge of a knife,
her nostrils, the oldish-looking nasolabial line, the depressions at the
corners of her mouth, her beautiful yet brutal chin, her unbeautiful
throat, with the washer-woman's pit in it--all these traits had a very
sobering effect upon Frederick, sapping from his imagination every bit
of its strength to beautify or palliate. Perhaps Miss Burns knew what
results from such strenuous, such persistently logical observation of an
object. In some ways it has the same effect as blood-letting. That is why
the artist must bleed to death unless new sources of illusion always open
up to him.

Moreover, in the long sittings, to which Ingigerd submitted from vanity,
she betrayed the narrowness, the attenuation, the barrenness of her mind.
In contrast with Miss Burns, Frederick perceived in Ingigerd with fearful
clearness that incompleteness which is eternally rudimentary. Once she
brought a letter from her mother in Paris and read it aloud. For about
a quarter of an hour, it actually seemed to torture her. It was serious,
severe, full of concern, and not unloving. Her mother referred
sorrowfully to Hahlstroem's death, and asked Ingigerd to come and live
with her in Paris. She told her of a woman in New York, the wife of a
German barber, with whom it would be eminently suitable for her to remain
until she returned to Europe. She even mentioned the steamer she should
take.

"I am not wealthy," she wrote. "You will have to help me with my work,
Ingigerd, but I will try to be a mother to you in every respect,"--here
came the apodosis--"if you make up your mind to change your mode of
life."

There was hard, stupid, even savage hatred in Ingigerd's commentaries on
this and other parts of her mother's letter.

"I am to go to her and repent," she mimicked, "because the Lord has so
miraculously saved me. Mamma should be the first to repent. I am not
going to be such a fool as to turn myself into a dressmaker. Always to
receive orders and listen to sermons from mamma! I am not bothered about
myself so long as I am not under somebody's thumb."

And so she went on, without the least hesitancy retailing the ugliest
intimacies in the life of her parents.