But the years that had passed, with their manifold emotions, experiences, and disillusions, with their awakenings of passion, with their plentiful gift of tears, with their later gift of an almost holy communion of souls, had completed the woman and the artist. One hunger remained to her--one that had had no place in her girlish cravings--a woman's hunger that is as a thing sacred, and wondrously softens her nature. An infinite compassion took within her the place of scorn. Her eyes had learned the trick of tenderness which illuminated her bright, fearless face. Her judgments became less harsh, gained in breadth what they lost in brilliance. She “saw life steadily and saw it whole.” Many of its mysteries had been revealed to her, and she had learned the road to the heart of others. The great lesson that Kent in the years before had suggested to her she grasped in its entirety, and it revolutionised her artistic career. No longer was her art a stepping-stone, a magic-lantern sheet on which to project life in order to realise its meaning. It was no longer the objective form of a vague craving, but the idealised record of an experience. When she painted the wistful, old-world look in a waif's eyes it was no longer with the impatient, fretful hope that its significance would be taught her from her own canvas; her awakened sight gazed with the sorrow of knowledge into the young soul, and she used her art to bear witness to the world of what was there. In a dim way she was conscious of this change of attitude--seeking within herself for the reason of the deeper, intenser, calmer feeling with which she approached her work. There came, too, a sense of responsibility, the necessity of perfecting whatever she painted in its presentation of truth. As her genius expanded the inner interpretation of the formula, “Art for art's sake,” dawned upon her in the realisation of the “sorrowful great gift” whereby the artist has the privilege of piercing through the media of sense and intellect and touching the naked soul of man.