The next morning I interviewed models again, and so strange is the human mind that while I honestly tried to find one that suited me, tried to be satisfied, I was full of feverish apprehension that I might do so, and when I had seen the last and could with perfect honesty reject her, I felt a rush of extraordinary elation all through me.  I knew, and told myself so, every half second, that Viola’s temptation was one I ought to and must resist, and yet the idea of yielding filled me with a wild instinctive delight that no reason could suppress.  Yes, because once an artist has seen or conceived by his own imagination his perfect ideal, nothing else, nothing short of this will satisfy him.  If it was difficult for me to find a model before, it was practically impossible to do so now.  For, having once realised what it wanted, the mind impatiently rejected everything else, though it might possibly have accepted something less than its desire before that realisation of it.

These models were all well-formed women, but they were commonplace.  The hold Viola’s form had upon the eye was that it was not commonplace.  Its beauty was distinctive, peculiar, arresting.  I was not a painter of types, but of exceptions.  The common things of life are not interesting, nor do I think they are worthy subjects for Art to concern itself with.  Something unusually beautiful, transcending the common type, is surely the best for the artist to try to perpetuate.

Friday came, the end of the week, and I was still without a model.  My nights had been nearly sleepless, and my days full of feverish anxiety:  an active anxiety to accept another sitter and withstand the temptation of Viola, which fought desperately with the more passive anxiety not to be satisfied and to be obliged to yield.  Between these two I had grown thin, as they fought within me, tearing me in the struggle.

To-day, Friday, the war was over.  I had sent a note to Viola asking her to have tea with me.  If she came, if she still held to her wish, I should accept, and the Phryne was assured.  How my heart leapt at the thought!  Those last hours before an artist gives the first concrete form to the brain children of his intangible dreams, how full of a double life he seems!  I was back from lunch and in the studio early; I could not tell when she might come, and I closed all the windows and made up the fire till the room seemed like a hot-house.  I arranged a dais with screens of flaming colour behind it reflecting the red rays of the fire.

If she consented, she should stand here after having changed into the Greek dress.  And as the moment chosen for the picture was that in which Phryne is unveiling herself before her judges, I intended to let her discard the drapery as she liked.  I should not attempt to pose her; I would not even direct her; I should simply watch her, and at some moment during the unveiling she would fall naturally into just the pose—­some pose—­I did not know myself yet which might give me my inspiration—­that I wished.  Then I would arrest her, ask her to remain in it.  I thought so we should arrive nearest to the effect of that famous scene of long ago.