He stepped toward a circular revolving-platform placed at the focus of the massed easels:  it was the model’s rack of patience, the mount of humiliation, the scaffold of exposure.

She had perhaps not understood that this would be required of her, this indignity, that she must climb upon a block like an old-time slave at an auction.  For one instant her fighting look came back and her eyes, though they rested on vacancy, blazed on vacancy and an ugly red rushed over her face which had been whiter than colorless.  Then as though she had become disciplined through years of necessity to do the unworthy things that must be done, she stepped resolutely though unsteadily upon the platform.  A long procession of men and women had climbed thither from many a motive on life’s upward or downward road.

He had specially chosen a chair for a three-quarter portrait, stately, richly carved; about it hung an atmosphere of high-born things.

Now, the body has definite memories as the mind has definite memories, and scarcely had she seated herself before the recollections of former years revived in her and she yielded herself to the chair as though she had risen from it a moment before.  He did not have to pose her; she had posed herself by grace of bygone luxurious ways.  A few changes in the arrangement of the hands he did make.  There was required some separation of the fingers; excitement caused her to hold them too closely together.  And he drew the entire hands into notice; he specially wished them to be appreciated in the portrait.  They were wonderful hands:  they looked eloquent with the histories of generations; their youthfulness seemed centuries old.  Yet all over them, barely to be seen, were the marks of life’s experience, the delicate but dread sculpture of adversity.

For a while it was as he had foreseen.  She was aware only of the brutality of her position; and her face, by its confused expressions and quick changes of color, showed what painful thoughts surged.  Afterward a change came gradually.  As though she could endure the ordeal only by forgetting it and could forget it only by looking ahead into the happiness for which it was endured, slowly there began to shine out upon her face its ruling passion—­the acceptance of life and the love of the mother glinting as from a cloud-hidden sun across the world’s storm.  When this expression had come out, it stayed there.  She had forgotten her surroundings, she had forgotten herself.  Poor indeed must have been the soul that would not have been touched by the spectacle of her, thrilled by her as by a great vision.

There was silence in the room of young workers.  Before them, on the face of the unknown, was the only look that the whole world knows—­the love and self-sacrifice of the mother; perhaps the only element of our better humanity that never once in the history of mankind has been misunderstood and ridiculed or envied and reviled.