what the face alone had done frankly, marvelously.  When you can print news on paper, you may cease to print news on the living countenance.  Moreover, the aim of civilization is to develop in us the consciousness not to express, but to suppress.  Its aim is not to reveal, but to conceal, thought and emotion; not to make the countenance a beacon-light, but a muffler of the inner candle, whatever that candle for the time may be.  All our ruling passions, good or bad, noble or ignoble, we now try publicly to hide.  This is civilization.  And thus the face, having started out expressionless in nature, tends through civilization to become expressionless again.

“How few faces does any one of us know that frankly radiate the great passions and moods of human nature!  What little is left of this ancient tremendous drama is the poor pantomime of the stage.  Search crowds, search the streets.  See everywhere masked faces, telling as little as possible to those around them of what they glory in or what they suffer.  Search modern portrait galleries.  Do you find portraits of either men or women who radiate the overwhelming passions, the vital moods, of our galled and soaring nature?  It is not a long time since the Middle Ages.  In the stretch of history centuries shrink to nothing, and the Middle Ages are as the earlier hours of our own historic day.  But has there not been a change even within that short time?  Did not the medieval portrait-painters portray in their sitters great moods as no painter portrays them now?  How many painters of to-day can find great moods in the faces of their sitters?

“And so I come again to your model.  What makes her so remarkable, so significant, so touching, so exquisite, so human, is the fact that her face seems almost a survival out of a past in which the beacon-lights of humanity did more openly appear on the features.  In her case one beacon-light most of all,—­the greatest that has ever shone on the faces of women,—­the one which seems to be slowly vanishing from the faces of modern women—­the look of the mother:  that transfiguration of the countenance of the mother who believed that the birth of a child was the divine event in her existence, and the emotions and energies of whose life centered about her offspring.  How often does any living painter have his chance to paint that look now!  Galleries are well filled with portraits of contemporary women who have borne children:  how often among these is to be found the portrait of the mother of old?”

He rose.  The talk was ended.  He looked again at his watch, and said: 

“It does not seem worth while to wait longer.  Evidently your model has been kept away to-day.  Let us hope that no ill has befallen her and that she will be here to-morrow.  If she is here, we shall go on with the portrait.  If she should not be here, I shall have another model ready, and we shall take up another study until she returns.  Bring fresh canvases.”