Suddenly she dropped the crayon and started up.

"Now you may move, Victor! I've finished!"

I brought my head down to its ordinary level with considerable
thankfulness, and as my eyes fell upon her I was rather startled. Her
figure seemed expanded as she stood, and the white serge of her bodice
rose and fell heavily. All the blood had flowed from her face, leaving
it blanched, colourless. In her eyes the azure iris had disappeared,
the dilated pupils had brimmed over it, and left nothing behind the
lashes but shining, liquid blackness. Unconsciously, seemingly, her
left hand was pressed to her left side, beneath the heart, and I saw it
tremble; and the whole form quivered as she leaned slightly forward
with her gaze bent upon the canvas. There was for the time being some
great force lent her. Some power had stirred in the brain, and now
seemed overflowing through the physical system--doubtless at its
expense. This was inspiration, certainly, and valuable for its creative
power, but the merely physical life and physical frame panted and
fainted after its painful throes to produce that which the brain
commanded. I looked at the girl, oblivious of me, oblivious of herself
and of the pain that forced her hand mechanically to her side--looked
half with pleasure, half with alarm. It must always bring a delight to
the human being to watch the triumph of intellect over matter, of the
mental over the physical system, of the mind over the body. The
sympathy of our own mind must go with the fellow-mind in its struggles
for freedom. It is like one captive calling to another from behind his
prison bars. But when we love the body too, and when our reason tells
us that the striving captive, if set free, must die; when we remember
that by some horrible, unnatural anomaly this spirit, that at times
seems divinity itself, is condemned to live in this abominable prison
and to perish there, with and in its fetters, then the wave of exultant
pleasure, of exuberant, arrogant triumph, that swept over us, poor
fellow-prisoners, watching those fetters shaken and almost cast off,
thunders back upon us, turned into the bitterest humiliation. I felt it
all--the pitiable mockery of man's nature, the inexplicable, terrible
union of a god and a brute in one frame, and the god dependent on the
brute, and both mortal--as I looked at the slight, lovely form of the
woman I loved, and saw it rocked and swayed, and left pained and
breathless with the str