“What will become of her--you who can wish but not will, you who wear away your time with comparing and feeling and looking, look here at what will become of her! First her mouth will be transformed--her eyes, too, of course, but there the change won’t be permanent all at once; her eyes will go back and forward a long while and kindle and be quenched, but the mouth will retain inflexibly all that is strong enough to force in a wrinkle, to bend a line. The lips will come to shut harder when they are not opened by laughter. Here everything will be constricted together: the weariness of desire, the suffocation of kisses; hate which congeals into loathing, shame that is stifled; and then certitude will encompass them, the certitude that it must be so, that that is the whole. “The cheek”--he almost touched it as it shone soft and pale in the light--“the cheek gets more sharply modeled, more set in contour, sinks in a little here, as when a flower petal withers. The forehead,--it will stay the same, only a line straight across as if an invisible knife had cut into the brain and divided the thoughts; barred in some to pine away up here, and driven the others to wrestle in nakedness and confinement. The hair,--it will grow darker with age and disfiguring attention, it will droop here and lie like a weight. The eyebrows,--you see there is a bend between them, they sink here, which gives a suggestion of nervous sensibility, of vibrating thoughts; but this will become no longer noticeable when she opens her eyes, nothing will be noticeable then but their depth of weariness, their infinity of freezing chill. “Imagine the color of the whole harder, more vivid; weigh down all that is heavy, make sharp all that is light and delicate, harden all that is strong, banish joy with a cuff and blushes with a sneer, and there you have her, that is what will become of her. Pretty, eh! prettier than now because she’ll be even more effective to draw, eh?” He stood silent a while and looked at her, his shadow trembling. Then he went on: “That’s what she’ll come to be, and that, too, is all that such as we have the right to think of. But what she _might_ be, ah! what she might be. If someone could take her as she lies there and dreams, take her and carry her far away and lift her on high in his arms. We keep on talking about art here, about what we intend and what the time is dreaming of. If there is anyone that has the same dreams that she has and the strength to will them, if there is anyone who’s a man, she is his. And what might not become of them both!”