“Why can’t you paint innocence?” she asked.

“I am going to tell you,” he replied, with more quickness of manner.  “It is to be the subject of my last lecture.  Ladies, school must close to-day.”

Esther and Catherine glanced at each other.  “You are going to send us away?” asked Catherine in a tone of surprise.

“You must go for the present,” answered Wharton.  “I mean to tell you the reason, and then you will see why I can’t paint innocence as you can.  As a lecture on art, my life is worth hearing, but don’t interrupt the story or you will lose it.  Begin by keeping in your mind that twenty years ago I was a ragged boy in the streets of Cincinnati.  The drawing master in a public school to which I went, said I had a natural talent for drawing, and taught me all he knew.  Then a little purse was made up for me and I was sent to Paris.  Not yet twenty years old, I found myself dropped into that great sewer of a city, a shy, ill-clothed, ill-fed, ill-educated boy, knowing no more of the world above me than a fish knows of the birds.  For two years I knocked about in a studio till my money was used up, and then I knew enough to be able to earn a few francs to keep me alive.  Then I went down to Italy and of course got a fever.  I came back at last to Paris, half-fed, dyspeptic and morbid.  I had visions, and the worst vision of my life I am going to tell you.

“It was after I had been some years at work and had got already a little reputation among Americans, that I was at my worst.  Nothing seemed real.  What earned me my first success was an attempt I made to paint the strange figures and fancies which possessed me.  I studied nothing but the most extravagant subjects.  For a time nothing would satisfy me but to draw from models at moments of intense suffering and at the instant of death.  Models of that kind do not offer themselves and are not to be bought.  I made friends with the surgeons and got myself admitted to one of the great hospitals.  I happened to be there one day when a woman was brought in suffering from an overdose of arsenic.  This was the kind of subject I wanted.  She was fierce, splendid, a priestess of the oracle!  Tortured by agony and clinging to it as though it were a delight!  The next day I came back to look for her:  she was then exhausted and half dead.  She was a superb model, and I took an interest in her.  When she grew better I talked with her and found that she was a sort of Parisian Pole with a strange history.  She had been living as an actress at one of the small theaters, and had attempted suicide in sheer disgust with life.  I had played with the same idea for years.  We had both struggled with the world and hated it.  Her imagination was more morbid than my own, and in her quieter moments, when her affections were roused, she was wonderfully tender and devoted.  When she left the hospital she put herself under my protection.  I believe she loved me, and no one