Thus within small compass humanity is here:  the cathedral, the hospital, the art school, and a strip of nature, and a broad highway along which, with their hearth-fires flickering fitfully under their tents of stone, are encamped life’s restless, light-hearted, heavy-hearted Gipsies.

* * * * *

It was Monday morning and it was nine o’clock.  Over at the National Academy of Design, in an upper room, the members of one of the women’s portrait classes were assembled, ready to begin work.  Easels had been drawn into position; a clear light from the blue sky of the last of April fell through the opened roof upon new canvases fastened to the frames.  And it poured down bountifully upon intelligent young faces.  The scene was a beautiful one, and it was complete except in one particular:  the teacher of the class was missing—­the teacher and a model.

Minutes passed without his coming, and when at last he did enter the room, he advanced two or three steps and paused as though he meant presently to go out again.  After his usual quiet good-morning with his sober smile, he gave his alert listeners the clue to an unusual situation: 

“I told the class that to-day we should begin a fresh study.  I had not myself decided what this should be.  Several models were in reserve, any one of whom could have been used to advantage at this closing stage of the year’s course.  Then the unexpected happened:  on Saturday a stranger, a woman, came to see me and asked to be engaged.  It is this model that I have been waiting for down-stairs.”

Their thoughts instantly passed to the model:  his impressive manner, his respectful words, invested her with mystery, with fascination.  His countenance lighted up with wonderful interest as he went on: 

“She is not a professional; she has never posed.  In asking me to engage her she proffered barely the explanation which she seemed to feel due herself.  I turn this explanation over to you because she wished, I think, that you also should not misunderstand her.  It is the fee, then, that is needed, the model’s wage; she has felt the common lash of the poor.  Plainly here is some one who has stepped down from her place in life, who has descended far below her inclinations, to raise a small sum of money.  Why she does so is of course her own sacred and delicate affair.  But the spirit in which she does this becomes our affair, because it becomes a matter of expression with her.  This self-sacrifice, this ordeal which she voluntarily undergoes to gain her end, shows in her face; and if while she poses, you should be fortunate enough to see this look along with other fine things, great things, it will be your aim to transfer them all to your canvases—­if you can.”

He smiled at them with a kind of fostering challenge to their over-confident impulses and immature art.  But he had not yet fully brought out what he had in mind about the mysterious stranger and he continued: