The face that was upturned to hers was no longer the insolent, heavy face of success which we have attempted to describe, but one in which the sudden leaping into evidence of a soul dismissed facts of color, contour, and line as matters of no importance.  If there was wickedness in his glance, there were also awe and wonder.  He had a tortured look, the look of a man who has fallen from unknowable heights—­from an Elysium which he regrets and desires with all a strong man’s strength, but to which the way back is irrevocably barred by the degradation and the sin of the descent—­and who, all but overwhelmed by the knowledge that he can never return whence he came, yet bears his eternal loss with an iron courage that has about it a kind of splendor.

Barbara Ferris felt that she was looking upon Satan in that moment when he first realized that his fall from heaven was for eternity and that, against every torturing passion of conviction, he must turn his talents and his fearful courage to the needs of hell.

In that first moment of their meeting, she realized nothing about the man but the terribly moving expression of his face.  Nothing else mattered.  If her plastic training was equal to catching and fixing that expression in clay or marble, she would be made according to the mould of her ambition.  The flame of art burned white and clear in the inmost shrine of her being.  She saw before her, and beneath her, not a human being, but an inspiration.  And since inspiration is a thing swift, electric, and trebly enticing from the fact that it presents itself shorn of all those difficulties which afterward, during execution, so terribly appear and multiply, her heart beat already with the exquisite bliss of an immortal achievement.  In her vocabulary at that instant it would have been impossible to discover under B the aggressive But, or under I the faltering If.  She was inspired.  It was enough.

Then she, in whose mind strong wings had suddenly sprouted, perceived that the person directly responsible had not even a pair of legs, and felt throughout her whole being a cold gushing of horror and revolt.

This was not lost upon Blizzard.  It was an ordinary enough human sensation, whose reflections had often enough given the iron that was in his soul another twist and refreshed in him vengefulness and hatred.  Yet on the present occasion the knowledge that he was physically loathed roused in the man a feeling rather of that despair which may be experienced by the drowning at that precise moment when the straw so eagerly clutched has proved itself a straw, and he winced as beneath a shocking blow between the eyes.

On discovering that the creature was maimed it had been Barbara’s first impulse to pass swiftly on.  But another glance at the face which had arrested her held her.  She took some coins from her purse and dropped them into the tin cup which the beggar held out to her.  And he looked upward into her face.