One Sunday afternoon he said to Emma Campbell, seriously: 

“You’ve never laid eyes on a goddess, Emma, have you?  Or a nymph?  Well, neither have I. And I can’t paint what I don’t know.”  He walked up and down the little graveled garden path.  And he burst out:  “That is not life.  It is not truth.  I don’t want gods.  I only see men!  I don’t want goddesses.  I want women!”

Emma Campbell said in a scandalized voice: 

“Dat ain’t no kind o’ way to talk!  Leastwise,” she compromised, “not on Sundays.”

Peter burst out laughing.  Emma wore her usual Sunday cashmere, with a snowy apron and head-handkerchief.  Satan lay upon the small table beside her, in the attitude of a sphinx, his black, velvety paws stretched in front of him, his inscrutable eyes watching the restless young man.  Peter paused, and his eyes narrowed.  Then he snapped his fingers, as he had done when he was a little boy back in Riverton and something had pleased him.

“I’ve got it!” he shouted.  “Emma, you’re It!”

No one ever had a more patient model.  She couldn’t exackly understan’ why Mist’ Peter should want to paint a ole nigger like her, but if Peter Champneys had wanted to bury her alive in the ground, with only her head sticking out, Emma would have known it had to be all right, somehow.  So she sat for weary hours, while Peter made rough sketches, and tried out many theories, before he settled down to work in dead earnest.

And presently Emma saw herself as it were alive on a square of canvas, so alive that she was more than a bit afraid.  She said it looked like her own ha’nt, and Emma wasn’t partial to ha’nts.  There she sat in her plain black dress and her plain white apron and head-handkerchief, and her gold hoop ear-rings.  On the table beside her were the vegetables she was to prepare.  She had forgotten work for the time being.  Emma projecked, one hand resting idly on the table, the other on the great black cat in her lap.  She looked at you, with the wistfully animal look of a negro woman, who is loving, patient, kind, long-suffering, imbued with a terrible patience, and of a sound, sly, earthy humor; and who at the same time is childishly credulous, full of dark passions, and with the fires of savagery banked in her heart.  There she sat, that sphinx that is Africa, who has seen the white races come, and who will probably see them go; you could almost sense the half-slumbrous brain of her throbbing under her head-handkerchief.  She wasn’t a mere colored woman; she was a symbol and a challenge.  And her eyes that had seen so much and wept so much were as inscrutable as fate, as sphinx-like as the cat’s who watched you from her knee.  The whole picture breathed an amazingly bold and original power, and was so arrestingly vital that it gripped and held one.  Down in one corner, painted with exquisite care and delicacy, was a Red Admiral.