He went back to the other end of the studio and sat down, facing them
with the impressiveness which belonged to him even without speech. They
fixed their eyes on him with the usual expectancy. Whenever as now an
unforeseen delay occurred, he was always prompt to take advantage of the
interval with a brief talk. To them there were never enough of these
brief talks, which invariably drew human life into relationship to the
art of portraiture, and set the one reality over against the other
reality--the turbulence of a human life and the still image of it on the
canvas. They hoped he would thus talk to them now; in truth he had the
air of casting about in his mind for a theme best suited to the moment.

* * * * *

That mother, now absent, when she had blindly found her way to him,
asking to pose, had fallen into good hands. He was a great teacher and
he was a remarkable man, remarkable even to look at. Massively built,
with a big head of black hair, olive complexion, and bluntly pointed,
black beard, and with a mold of countenance grave and strong, he looked
like a great Rembrandt; like some splendid full-length portrait by
Rembrandt painted as that master painted men in the prime of his power.
With the Rembrandt shadows on him even in life. Even when the sun beat
down upon him outdoors, even when you met him in the blaze of the city
streets, he seemed not to have emerged from shadow, to bear on himself
the traces of a human night, a living darkness. There was light within
him but it did not irradiate him.

Once he had been a headlong art student himself, starting out to become
a great painter, a great one. After years abroad under the foremost
masters and other years of self-trial with every favorable circumstance
his, nature had one day pointed her unswerved finger at his latest