he kicks them.  The bad-tempered have the best of it in this vile world.  I cannot tell you how I grew to pity that poor girl.  Living in her daily presence, I marked the thousand and one trials of which her life was made up, all borne with the same sweetness and good-humour.  I discovered that she had a bed-ridden mother, whom she kept in the attic, and whom she stole up to attend to fifty times a day, sitting with her when her work was done and the moonlight on the Sound tempted one to be out enjoying one’s youth.  Alone she managed and financed the entire establishment, aided only by a little maid-of-all-work, just squeezing out a scanty living for herself and her mother.  If ever there was an angel on earth it was Ingeborg Jensen.  I tell you, when I see the angels of the Italian masters I feel they are all wrong:  I don’t want flaxen-haired cherubs to give me an idea of heaven in this hell of a world.  I just want to see good honest faces, full of suffering and sacrifice, and if ever I paint an angel its phiz shall have the unflinching ugliness of Ingeborg Jensen, God bless her!  To be near her was to live in an atmosphere of purity and pity and tenderness, and everything that is sweet and sacred.”

As he spoke I became suddenly aware that the gas-lights were paling, and glancing towards the window on my left I saw the splendour of the sunrise breaking fresh and clear over the city of diabolical night, where in the sombre eastern sky—­

“God made himself an awful rose of dawn.”

A breath of coolness and purity seemed to waft into the feverish ball-room; a ray of fresh morning sunlight.  I looked curiously at the young artist.  He seemed transfigured.  I could scarcely realise that an hour ago he had been among the rowdiest of the Comus crew, whose shrieks and laughter still rang all around us.  Even his duplex costume seemed to have grown subtly symbolical, the diabolical part typical of all that is bestial and selfish in man, the death-mask speaking silently of renunciation and the peace of the tomb.  He went on, after a moment of emotion:  “They say that pity is akin to love, but I am not sure that I ever loved her, for I suppose that love involves passion, and I never arrived at that.  I only came to feel that I wanted to be with her always, to guard her, to protect her, to work for her, to suffer for her if need be, to give her life something of the joy and sweetness that God owed her.  I felt I wasn’t much use in the world, and that would be something to do.  And so one day—­though not without much mental tossing, for we are curiously, complexly built, and I dreaded ridicule and the long years of comment from unsympathetic strangers—­I asked her to be my wife.  Her surprise, her agitation, was painful to witness.  But she was not incredulous, as before; she had learned to know that I respected her.

“Nevertheless, her immediate impulse was one of refusal.

“‘It cannot be,’ she said, and her bosom heaved spasmodically.