"I'm doing the best I can, and I look more like those dames than you
look like a painter!"

"Shut up! I'm paying you a dollar an hour to pose, not to talk back to
me. And you'd have more respect for my money if you knew how hard I
had to work to earn it: carrying a motor car around in each hand. Wash
off that scowl and try to look as I said ... There, that's better.
Hold it."

He began to paint rapidly, with quick glances back and forth between
the canvas and Maggie. Maggie's dress was just the ordinary shirt-
waist and skirt that the shopgirl and her sisters wear; Hunt had
ordered it so. She was above the medium height, with thick black hair
tinted with shadowy blue, long dark lashes, dark scimitars of
eyebrows, a full, firm mouth, a nose with just the right tilt to it--
all effective points for Hunt in what he wished to do. But what had
attracted him most and given him his idea was her look; hardly
pertness, or impudence--rather a cynical, mature, defiant certainty
in herself.

Erect in her cheap shirt-waist, she gazed off into space with a
smiling, confident challenge to all the world. Hunt was trying to make
his picture a true portrait--and also make it a symbol of many things
which still were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising
from the gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign
above it; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the
upper stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or
conquering it. Leading families replaced by other families, classes
replaced by other classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was
the inevitable social process--so read the records of the fifty or