“We teachers of art schools in engaging models have to take from human material as we find it.  The best we find is seldom or never what we would prefer.  If I, for instance, could have my choice, my students would never be allowed to work from a model who repelled the student or left the student indifferent.  No students of mine, if I could have my way, should ever paint from a model that failed to call forth the finest feelings.  Otherwise, how can your best emotions have full play in your work; and unless your best emotions enter into your work, what will your work be worth?  For if you have never before understood the truth, try to realize it now:  that you will succeed in painting only through the best that is in you; just as only the best in you will ever carry you triumphantly to the end of any practical human road that is worth the travel; just as you will reach all life’s best goals only through your best.  And in painting remember that the best is never in the eye, for the eye can only perceive, the eye can only direct; and the best is never in the hand, for the hand can only measure, the hand can only move.  In painting the best comes from emotion.  A human being may lack eyes and be none the poorer in character; a human being may lack hands and be none the poorer in character; but whenever in life a person lacks any great emotion, that person is the poorer in everything.  And so in painting you can fail after the eye has gained all necessary knowledge, you can fail after your hand has received all necessary training, either because nature has denied you the foundations of great feeling, or because, having these foundations, you have failed to make them the foundations of your work.

“But among a hundred models there might not be one to arouse such emotion.  Actually in the world, among the thousands of people we know, how few stir in us our best, force us to our best!  It is the rarest experience of our lifetimes that we meet a man or a woman who literally drives us to the realization of what we really are and can really do when we do our best.  What we all most need in our careers is the one who can liberate within us that lifelong prisoner whose doom it is to remain a captive until another sets it free—­our best.  For we can never set our best free by our own hands; that must always be done by another.”

They were listening to him with a startled recognition of their inmost selves.  He went on to drive home his point about the stranger: 

“I am going to introduce to you, then, a model who beyond all the others you have worked with will liberate in you your finer selves.  It is a rare opportunity.  Do not thank me.  I did not find her.  Life’s storms have blown her violently against the walls of the art school; we must see to it at least that she be not further bruised while it becomes her shelter, her refuge.  Who she is, what her life has been, where she comes from, how she happens to arrive here—­these are privacies