In the form before me, the lines were short and often abrupt, the curves quick and expressionless; it would do capitally for the “Bacchante,” it would not have served for a moment for the “Soul of the Wood.”

The girl was smiling now, and appeared quite amiable.  Most people are when they have got their own way.  She asked me if I thought she would do.

“Yes, I think you will.  Stand back there, please, against that green curtain.  Now put one foot forward as if you were advancing.  Yes, that’s right; lift both your arms up over your head.”

I got up to give her a hoop of wire to hold as an arch over her, and put a spray of artificial ivy over it.

“That’ll do.  Now stand still, and let’s see how that works out.”

The girl posed well.  Evidently she was a model of considerable practice, and I obtained an excellent sketch before a quarter to six, when she said she must leave off and dress.

She did so in silence, while I studied my own work.  When she had her hat on I looked up and asked her if she wanted to be paid.

“No,” she answered, “we’ll leave it till the end of the week.  Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” I said, and she went out.  I laid the sketch on the table beside me, and sat thinking.  A sudden blankness fell upon me as I stood mentally opposite this new idea that had never presented itself to me in the same form before, that in my former easy, wandering existence I had always welcomed a beautiful model, not only for the gain to my art, but because of the incidental pleasure it might bring me.  But now I realised suddenly that this girl’s beauty brought me no elation. It was not any use, and in a flash I saw, too, that no woman now, no beauty could be any use to me ever any more, for I was not a single irresponsible existence any longer, but involved with another which was sacred to me.

How often in the past, when entangled in some light liaison, I had wished for deeper, stronger emotions, something to wake the mind and stir the soul!  Then in my love for Viola I had found all these and welcomed them madly.  She had stirred my whole sleeping being into flame, and given me those keener and stronger desires of the brain, and satisfied them; and till now it had seemed to me that this passion for her was a free gift from the hands of Fate.  Now, suddenly, I saw that the gift had its price.  That, after all, there was something to be said for those light free loves of the past.  That some joy had been taken out of life, now those glittering trifles, toys of the senses, were taken from me, made impossible.

For the first time I realised that a great passion has its yoke, and that, in return for the great joy it gives, it demands and takes one’s freedom.

I sat motionless, feeling overwhelmed by the sudden blaze of light that the simple incident of this model’s advent had thrown on an obscure psychological fact.