were of the same divine inkiness, very warm and long; a mouth level to
the world, resolute, at the corners a little smiling, was scarlet
against a smooth field of golden-brown.

If she had a certain admiration of her own beauty it was the admiration
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