Passing swiftly down the avenue, she did not know whether, upon arriving at her studio in McBurney Place, she should get into her working-apron or make an end, once and for all, of artistic pursuits.  But with the lifting of the legless beggar’s face to hers, all doubts vanished from her mind like smoke from a room when the windows and doors are opened.  Whatever his face might have revealed to another, to her it was Satan’s, newly fallen, and she read into it a whole wonder of sin, tragedy, desolation, and courage; and knew well that if she could reproduce what she seemed to see, the world would be grateful to her.  She would give it a face which it would never make an end of discussing, which should be in sculpture what the face of Mona Lisa is in painting.  It would be the face of a man whom one jury would hang upon the merest suspicion; for whom another would return a verdict of “not guilty” no matter what the nature of his proved crimes; and whether the face was beautiful or hideous would be a matter of dispute for the ages.

Upon arriving at No. 17 McBurney Place, and having climbed two flights of stairs, the door of her studio was opened before she could lay hand to the knob, and a very small boy with very big eyes, and no more flesh upon his bones than served to distinguish him from a living skeleton, appeared on the threshold, smiling, you may say, from head to foot.  He was dressed in a blue suit with bobbed tails and a double row of bright brass buttons down the front, and when she had gathered him from the gutter in which he had reached to his present stunted stature, a child half gone in pneumonia, he had told her that his name, his whole name, was “Bubbles” and nothing but “Bubbles.”

“Good morning, Miss Barbara,” he said; “the plumber’s bin and gone, and the feller from the hardware store has swore hell be around before noon to fix the new knobs in the doors.”

“Good!” said Barbara.  “Well done, Bubbles.”

And she passed into the studio, wondering why a little face all knotting with smiles, affection, and the pleasure of commands lovingly received and well obeyed, should remind her of that other face, massive, sardonic, lost, satanic, which had looked up into hers across the battered tin cup on the top of a battered street-organ.  She turned to a little clay head that she had made recently and for which Bubbles had sat; touched it here and there, stepped back from it, turned her own head to the left, to the right, and even, such was the concentration of her mood, showed between her red lips the tip of a still redder tongue.  But no matter what she did to test and undo her first impression there persisted between the two faces a certain likeness, though in just what this resemblance consisted she was unable to say.

“Bubbles,” she said, “you were telling me about beggars the other day and how much they make, and how rich some of them are.  Did you ever run across one that sells shoe-laces, plays a hand-organ, and hasn’t got any legs?”