She went, as of old, into the streets for her models, choosing the side of life least understanded of Philistia, sublimating that which was spiritual, eternal in abject and outcast, beggar and courtesan. Strange were the walks of Kent and herself about the great city, by day and by night, and strange the spars and fragments of humanity they picked up in these rambles, who found their way afterwards to Clytie's studio. They went together to East End music halls, bank holiday gatherings, thieves' kitchens, night clubs in the West End, where ladies are admitted free on a member's introduction, Kent paying his subscription almost at the door. It was towards women that Clytie's sympathy flowed the strongest. Her first contact with one of _ces autres_ in the hotel at Dinan had set a chord vibrating within her that now rang out full and true. She could paint these women, young, withered, children on the lurid threshold, old women with charred and blackened past. It is the moralist's part to condemn, evolve the moral; the artist on the higher plane disintegrates the spiritual from the animal and presents it in the form of Truth. From the comedy of misery, the tragedy of sex, the never ending drama of vice and crime, the one draws groans, the other tears. Each has his place in the cosmos. Thus Clytie, artist and woman, walked through the abomination of desolation and opened the eyes of the world to the glimmering spiritual rays that shot across it. Once more she took out the studies she had made for the “Faustina” picture. This time she could look on them without a shudder, only sadly. The picture would never be painted. She was no longer in feverish, passionate search after mysteries that had baffled her. The picture now had no artistic reason for existence. It would be a cruel, despairing work, a tragedy of cynicism. Knowledge of the world had given her knowledge of self; she knew now how blent were the foreshadowings of passion in her own soul with those that she had hungered to express on the young face of Faustina. In those days she could have found a model in her own mirror, and then the personal note dominating the picture would have saved it from heartlessness. For the complete woman to paint it would be the presentation of the damnation of a young soul. But the contemplation of her earlier work suggested vividly the converse of the subject--a Faustina swept away by the whirl of passion with the after-light of innocence in her soul's depths. The conception grew within her, took form, awoke the full artist in the ripe woman. With a throbbing sense of mastery, a quivering thrill of inspiration, new to her as the first love kiss on a young girl's lips, she betook herself to her task.