he Shadowy Sister in this and that
other romance, was one of the most astonishing things in Beth's
experience. (Sailor-man had but to enter and speak, for Shadowy Sister
to appear in kneeling adoration.)

Often Bedient was allowed to stay while she worked at other things. His
own portrait prospered slowly, a fact in which the world might have
found humor. And often they talked together long after the slanting
light had made work impossible; their faces altered in the dim place;
their voices low.... There were moments when the woman's heart stirred
to break its silence; when the man before her seemed bravely a man, and
the confines of his nature to hold magnificent distances. If she could
creep within those confines, would it not mean truly to live?... But
the years would sweep through her mind--grim, gray, implacable
chariots--and in their dusty train, the specific memories of fleshly
limitation and untruth. To survive, she had been forced to lock her
heart; to hold every hope in the cold white fingers of fear; cruelly to
curb the sweep of feminine outpouring, lest its object soften into
chaos; and roused womanhood, returning empty--overwhelm. This is the
sorriest instinct of self-preservation.

She would have said at this time that Andrew Bedient had not aroused
the woman in her as the Other had done. Indeed, she paled at the
thought that the Other had exhausted a trifle, her great force of
heart-giving. There had been beauty in such a bestowal--pain and
passion--but beauty, too.... Another strange circumstance: Bedient had
made her think of the Other so differently. She had half put away her
pride; she might have been too insistent for her rights. The Other
really had improved miraculously from the poor boy who had come to
their house. And to the artist's eye, he was commandingly masculine, a
veritable ideal.... Bedient was different every day.

The visit to the gallery, too, had given Beth much to think over. What
he had said about the pictures, especially before the one he had called
_The Race Mother_, had revealed his processes of mind, and made her
feel very small for a while. She saw that all her own talk had not
lifted from herself, from her own troubles, and certain hateful aspects
of the world; while his thoughts had concerned the sufferings of all
women, and the fruitage that was to come from them. She had talked for
herself; he for the race. But he had merely _observed_ the life of
women, while she had li