g, imbued with a terrible patience, and
of a sound, sly, earthy humor; and who at the same time is
childishly credulous, full of dark passions, and with the fires of
savagery banked in her heart. There she sat, that sphinx that is
Africa, who has seen the white races come, and who will probably see
them go; you could almost sense the half-slumbrous brain of her
throbbing under her head-handkerchief. She wasn't a mere colored
woman; she was a symbol and a challenge. And her eyes that had seen
so much and wept so much were as inscrutable as fate, as sphinx-like
as the cat's who watched you from her knee. The whole picture
breathed an amazingly bold and original power, and was so
arrestingly vital that it gripped and held one. Down in one corner,
painted with exquisite care and delicacy, was a Red Admiral.

The Quartier came, squinted through the fingers, and praised and
dispraised, after its wont. The Symbolists sneered and told Peter to
his teeth he was a Philistine; they said you can't boot-lick Nature:
you've got to bully her, demand her soul, _make_ her give you her
Sign! Quieter men came and studied Emma Campbell and her cat, and
clapped Peter on the back; the more exuberant Latins kissed him,
noisy, hearty, hairy kisses on both cheeks. Undoubtedly, it would be
accepted, they said!

It was, and hung conspicuously. There were always small groups
before it, for it created something like the uproar that Manet's
"Olympia" had raised in its time. Peter learned from one critic that
his technique was magnificent, his picture a masterpiece of
psychology and of portraiture, and that if he kept on he'd soon be
one of the Immortals. He learned from another that while he
undoubtedly had technique, his posing was commonplace, his subject
banal, his imagination hopelessly bourgeois; that he was a painter
of the ugly and the ordinary, without inspiration or imagination;
that the one pretty and delicate note in the whole canvas was the
butterfly in the lower left-hand corner, and that _that_ was
obviously reminiscent of Whistler, who on a time had used a
butterfly signature! But on the whole the criticisms were highly
favorable; it was admitted that a young painter of promise had
arisen.

Peter Champneys went about his business, indifferent to praise or
blame. _He_ knew he was a way-faring man whose business it was to
follow his own road, a road he had to hack out for himself; and
somewhere on the horizon were the purple height