rs of them curved upwards a trifle as she surveyed the
canvas.

The turban was loosened and held in her hands as she stood there
looking. The picture evidently attracted her, though it did not
please. At last she turned to the artist.

"Why do you paint pictures like that?"

"Like that? Pouf! You mean beautiful?"

"No, it is not beautiful," she said, thoughtfully, as she seated
herself on the dais by the dowager's couch. "To be truly beautiful a
thing must impress one with a sense of fitness to our highest
perceptive faculties. A soulless thing is never beautiful."

"What then, of dogs, horses, lions, the many art works in metal or on
canvas?"

"You must not raise that wall against her words, Loris, unless you
wish to quarrel," said the dowager in friendly warning. "Judithe is
pantheist enough to fancy that animals have souls."

"But the true artist does not seek to portray the lowest expression of
that soul," persisted Dumaresque's critic. "Across the Atlantic there
are thousands who contend that a woman such as this Kora whom you
paint, has no soul because of the black blood in her veins. They think
of the dark people as we think of apes. It is all a question of
longitude, Monsieur Dumaresque. The crudeness of America is the jest
of France. The wisdom of France is the lightest folly of the Brahims;
and so it goes ever around the world. The soul of that girl will weigh
as heavily as ours in the judgment that is final; but, in the
meantime, why teach it and others to admire all that allurement of
evil showing in her eyes as she looks at you?"

"Judithe!" protested the dowager.

"Oh!--I do not doubt in the least, Maman, that the woman Kora looked
just so when she sat for the picture," conceded the girl; "but why not
endeavor to awaken a higher, stronger expression, and paint _that_,
showing the better possibilities within her than mere seductiveness?"

"What fervor and what folly, Marquise!" cried Dumaresque. "It is a
speech of folly only because it is I whom you ask to be the
missionary, and because it is the pretty Kora you would ask me to
convert--and to what? Am I so perfect in all ways that I dare preach,
even with paint and brush? Heavens! I should have all Paris laughing
at me."

"But Judithe would not have you that sort of extremist," said the
dowager, laughing at the dismay in his face. "She knows you do well;
only she fears you do not exert yourself enough to perceive how you
might do better."