He persuaded her to throw boldly aside the glittering, tinsel garb in which she walked before the world, and so to stand before him in all the hideous vulgarity, the intellectual poverty and the moral depravity of her naked self.
At times, when, under his intense gaze, she drew the cloak of her pretenses hurriedly about her, he sat before his picture without touching the canvas, waiting; or, perhaps, he paced the floor; until, with skillful words, her fears were banished and she was again herself.

Then, with quick eye and sure, ready hand, he wrought into the portrait upon the easel--so far as the power was given him--all that he saw in the face of the woman who--posing for him, secure in the belief that he was painting a lie--revealed her true nature, warped and distorted as it was by an age that, demanding realism in art, knows not what it demands.

Always, when the sitting was finished, he drew the curtain to hide the picture; forbidding her to look at it until he said that it was finished.
Much of the time, when he was not in the studio at work, the painter spent with Mrs.Taine and her friends, in the big touring car, and at the house on Fairlands Heights.

But the artist did not, now, enter into the life of Fairlands' Pride for gain or for pleasure--he went for study--as a physician goes into the dissecting room.

He justified himself by the old and familiar argument that it was for his art's sake.
Sibyl Andres, he seldom saw, except occasionally, in the early morning, in the rose garden.