She stood the picture on the chair which she had pulled up before her so as to rest her feet on the rung, off the stone floor, still to be felt, she imagined, through the rug. Of course it was herself, but how disappointing--disappointing enough to shed tears over--to have this held up to her after that lovely being down-stairs! How unkind of her friend Gerald! Unfair, too, for although this, in not being a beauty, was obviously more like her than the other, she could not admit that it was any truer. She could not believe that she ever really looked like this, though she knew that it was the way she sometimes felt. How had Gerald known she ever felt like this? That she was a person who ate well, slept well, felt well, loved fun, was giving and gay--that was all most people knew, or were entitled to know, of her; all she knew of herself a good deal of the time. Such things could never be the whole of any person, of course. Every one has had something to overcome. Some persons have had to overcome and overcome and overcome, one thing after another, one thing after another, that has tried to drag and keep them down. She had had--probably because, as her mother often told her, she was born with such a lot of the devil in her--a great many trials sent to her, for her discipline, no doubt, her cleansing; but she had come out of them still unreduced, still eager for a good time. All persons are made up, in a way, of these experiences of the past, but they don't expose them in their faces, they forget them as much as they can. Yes, as much as they can. How much is that? The only true sorrows being involved with one's affections, and the objects of one's love never far from one's thoughts, how much could a person be said to forget her sorrows, really? Aurora reflected upon this for some time, staring the while at her portrait. The face looking back from the canvas was very like her, had she but known it, at this exact moment, while the thoughts produced, the memories wakened, by it substituted for her ordinary hardiness the delicate look of a capacity for pain. As she gazed at the portrait longer she liked it better; from minute to minute she became more reconciled, and found herself finally almost attracted. Something from it penetrated her for which she had no definition. It was perhaps the dignity of humanity confronting her in that strong and simple face framed by the kerchief, like a woman of the people's,--her own face, but not certainly as she saw it in the mirror; a humanity that out of the common materials offered to it day by day had rejected all that was mean and contrived to build up nobleness.