“Can this be he who preached the Sermon upon the Mount? Can this be he who said to the woman taken in adultery, ‘Daughter, go thy ways, and sin no more’?” Already the roughness of the advocate was melted into blood and tears. His callous rage had yielded before the figure of the Magdalene. This nondescript animal he had picked out of a sewer had proved to be a woman who had bled for abasement, and who strove for reinstatement by bleeding for it again. “I have a curiosity about your history,” said Northcote, with a gaze that devoured her. “You see you are pictured in my imagination as the denizen of a slum.” “I entered upon life,” said the woman, yielding to the domination of his eyes, “as the eldest daughter of an artist whose existence was a misery. He was a painter of masterpieces that no one would buy. He had not been in his grave a year when they began to realize sums that during his life would have appeared to him as fabulous. His two girls, who comprised his family, never got the benefit of the recognition that had been denied to their maker; but the dealers in pictures, who had begrudged him so much as oils and canvas, grew rich by trading upon a great name. “My childhood was bitter, cruel, and demoralizing. Art for the sake of art was the doctrine of my poor father, and in pursuing it he took to drink. That honest and virtuous world which I have never been allowed to enter, viewed him afar off as an outcast, as an idle and dissolute vagabond, as a worthless citizen, whose nature was reflected in his calling. Perhaps he was all this; perhaps he was more. Yet he would shut himself up in a little back parlor in the squalid little house in which we lived, and there he would work in a frenzy for days together. He would emerge with his nerves in rags, his skin pale, his eyes bloodshot, his linen foul, his clothes and person in disorder, yet under his arm was a new masterpiece, twelve inches by sixteen, which he would carry round to a dealer, who would bully and browbeat him, and screw him down to the last shilling, which he already owed for the rent. He would return home worn out in mind and body by his labors; and for weeks he was unable to bear the sight of a brush or a skin of paint. It was then he would seek to assuage his morbid irritation with the aid of drink. ‘They will place a tablet over this hovel when I am dead,’ he would say, ‘but while I am alive the rope which is needed to hang me outbuys the worth of this tattered carcass.’