“Quoth heart of neither maid nor wife To tongue of neither wife nor maid, ‘Thou wag’st, but I am worn with strife, And feel like flowers that fade.’” The scene is in a tent at early daybreak, amid a group of gamblers and depraved women throwing dice. But one of them is a girl still beautiful, and not yet hardened by the coarseness of her new life. She shrinks from the kiss of the player who bends over her hand. “Yesterday’s Rose” is not wholly faded; only her first fresh bloom is gone; she has bartered it irretrievably for her chance in the desperate game of passion, like the vengeful woman in “The Laboratory,” offering her pearls to buy poison for her enemy. The contrast between the shamed “rose” and her brutalized companions is emphasized by the tender light of the dawn, which creeps through the orchard trees outside, and makes the lamp within appear more yellow and dull and weak. Entirely modern in spirit and execution is Holman Hunt’s treatment of a similar theme. The “Awakening Conscience” is that of a girl idling with her paramour in a newly and luxuriously furnished room. He has been singing to her, not noticing the change in her face, and his hands still pass carelessly over the pianoforte keys. But the words of the song— Moore’s “Oft in the Stilly Night”—have stirred a sudden anguish in her heart; she has started up, tortured with long pent memories and overcome with shame and despair. The utter falsity of her new surroundings seems to strike her as she gazes round the cruelly unhomelike home. A terrible symbolism confronts her on every side; the showy tapestry is woven with a design of ripe corn on which the carrion birds are feeding; the picture hanging above the mantelpiece represents the woman taken in adultery. The tragic intensity of the painting is hardly surpassed by any other of the artist’s work.