invigorated by the air of the country and the ocean.  The head, intellectual and daring, with a countenance as of one who has understood everything, has for a sort of aureole the vaguely gilded design of one of those Renaissance stuffs which the Venetians call soprarisso.  The rounded arms, in which the muscles can hardly be seen, are joined by the clasped hands,—­firm hands, the thumb almost too long, which might guide four horses with the precision of an English coachman.  It is the picture of an energy at once delicate and invincible, momentarily in repose; and all the Byzantine Madonna is in that face with its wide-open eyes.

Yes, this woman is an idol, for whose service man labors, which he has decked with the jewels of a queen, behind each one of whose whims lie days and days spent in the ardent battle of Wall Street.  Frenzy of speculations in land, cities undertaken and built by sheer force of millions, trains launched at full speed over bridges built on a Babel-like sweep of arch, the creaking of cable cars, the quivering of electric cars, sliding along their wires with a crackle and a spark, the dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high, immense wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal slaughter-houses,—­all the formidable traffic of this country of effort and struggle, all its labor,—­these are what have made possible this woman, this living orchid, unexpected masterpiece of this civilization.

Did not the very painter consecrate to her his intense toil?  To be capable of such a picture, he must have absorbed some of the ardor of the Spanish masters, caught the subtlety of the great Italians, understood and practiced the curiosities of impressionism, dreamed before the pictures in basilicas like Ravenna, and read and thought.  Ah, how much of culture, of reflection, before one could fathom the secret depths of one’s own race!  He has expressed one of the most essential characteristics of the race,—­the deification of woman, considered not as a Beatrice as in Florence, nor as a courtesan as at Milan, but as a supreme glory of the national spirit.

This woman can do without being loved.  She has no need of being loved.  What she symbolizes is neither sensuality nor tenderness.  She is like a living object of art, the last fine work of human skill, attesting that the Yankee, but yesterday despairing, vanquished by the Old World, has been able to draw from this savage world upon which fate has cast him a wholly new civilization, incarnated in this woman, her luxury and her pride.  Everything is illuminated by this civilization, at the gaze of these fathomless eyes, in the expression of which the painter has succeeded in putting all the idealism of this country which has no ideal; all that which perhaps will one day be its destruction, but up to the present time is still its greatness,—­a faith in the human Will, absolute, unique, systematic, and indomitable.

Copyrighted by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.