why nature in dowering
her with a big brain had not made for her a more refined mouth. The
upper part of her face was often illuminated; the lower narrowly escaped
coarseness; and a head of rusty red hair gave a total impression of
strenuous brilliancy, of keen abiding vitality. A self-willed New York
girl who had never undergone the chastening influence of discipline or
rigorously ordered study--she averred that it would attenuate the
individuality of her style; avowedly despising the classics, she was a
modern of moderns in her tastes.

She had nerves rather than heart, but did not approve of revealing her
vagaries in diary form. Adoring Guy de Maupassant, she heartily disliked
Marie Bashkirtseff. The Frenchman's almost Greek-like fashion of
regarding life in profile, his etching of its silver-tipped angles, made
an irresistible appeal to her; and she vainly endeavored to catch his
crisp, restrained style, his masterly sense of form. In the secrecy of
her study she read Ouida and asked herself why this woman had not gone
farther, and won first honors in the race. Her favorite heroines were
Ibsen's Nora, Rebecca and Hedda. Then, bitten by the emancipation craze,
she was fast developing into one of the "shrieking sisterhood" when
Arthur Vibert came from Berlin.

A Frenchman has said that the moment a woman occupies her thoughts with
a man, art ceases for her. The night Ellenora Bishop met the young
pianist in my atelier, I saw that she was interested. Arthur came to me
with letters from several German critics. I liked the slender, blue-eyed
young fellow who was not a day over twenty-one. His was a true American
type tempered by Continental culture. Oval-faced, fair-haired, of a
rather dreamy disposition and with a certain austerity of manner, he was
the fastidious puritan--a puritan expanded by artistic influences.
Strangely enough he had temperament, and set to music Heine and
Verlaine. A genuine talent, I felt assured, and congratulated myself on
my new discovery; I was fond of finding lions, and my Sunday evenings
were seldom without some specimen that roared, if somewhat gently, yet
audibly enough, for my visitors. When Arthur Vibert was introduced to
Ellenora Bishop, I recognized the immediate impact of the girl's brusque
personality upon his sensitized nature.

She was a devoted admirer of Wagner, and that was bond enough to set
reverberating other chords of sympathy in the pair. I do not assert in
cold blood