It was a discouraged but resolute Barbara who stepped forth from her
father's house that bright morning in May and passed rather than walked
down the quiet upper stretches of Fifth Avenue. That she might fail in
art, and make a mess of her life generally, sometimes occurred to her.
And it was a thought which immeasurably distressed her. It would be too
dreadful a humiliation to crawl back into the place which she had so
confidently quitted for a better; to be pointed out as a distinguished
amateur who had not succeeded as a professional; and to take up once
more the rounds of dinners, dances, and sports which serve so well to
keep the purposeless young and ignorant.

To society the tragedy of Barbara's back-sliding into art was very real.
Dozens of men said very frankly that they missed her like the very
devil. "There is nobody else," they said, "quite so straightforward, or
quite so good-looking."

Hers was a face not less vivid than a light. It seemed that in her, the
greatest artist of all, abandoning the accepted conventions of beauty,
had created an original masterpiece. If she had been too thin, her eyes,
tranquil, sea-blue, and shining, must have been too large. Her nose was
Phidian Greek; her chin, but for an added youthful tenderness, was
almost a replica of Madame Duse's; a long round throat carried nobly a
gallant round head, upon which the hair was of three distinct colors.
The brown in the Master's workshop had not, it seemed, held out; she had
been finished with tones of amber and deep red. The brown was straight,
the red waved, the amber rioted in curls and tendrils. Below this
exquisite massing of line and color, against a low broad forehead, were
set, crookedly, short narrow eyebrows of an intense black; her eyelashes