The glow had lingered, even become intensified in Gresham's face. "By Jove!" he cried again, "you were trying to be sarcastic and all that, Dita, but it was a great idea of yours just the same. I will paint your portrait and it shall be hung side by side with my working girl. They shall be companions of contrast. You see," explaining his idea to Hepworth, "I am going to paint my working girl in the city streets just at twilight on a winter evening, hastening home after the day's long toil. The lights and colors of the shop windows dance and glitter about her, blurred by the falling snow. Everything, lights, buildings, passers-by, are all in that blurred, indistinct atmosphere, and she, herself, is a part of the blur, looking through it, with her young, worn face and wistful eyes, craving the beauty and the joy of life." "No, no!" cried Dita suddenly. Rising, she moved rapidly up and down the room, her head bent, her finger at her lip. "No!" she cried again, her voice deeply vibrating. "I reckon you've just missed it, Eugene, it's too--too conventional. I can imagine something truer than that. My working girl, if I were painting her, should not be born to toil, not always have regarded it as the great fact of existence, an inevitable portion of her days and years from which she has never dreamed of escape. No, I would picture her delicate, highly nurtured, with traditions of race and breeding behind her; but poor, oh, very poor. And she shouldn't look out on life with resigned, wistful eyes, but with passionate, demanding ones, rebelling that her youth, her wonderful, beautiful, dreaming youth was passing in a tomb of tradition, a green and flowery tomb perhaps, maybe an old southern garden, but nevertheless a place of dead lives, dead memories, dead customs. And she, this girl, hates it, the dust and must of it. She hears always in her ears the surges of that mighty ocean of life. And she can't resist it. She can't. Then because her heart is set on it, she comes to a great city like this, comes with all her high hopes and her untarnished confidence in herself; and all this magnificent swirling tide of life, with its mingled and mingling streams, seems to bear her onward to the highest crest of the highest wave. Then she begins to hear, at first faintly and then ever louder and more menacing, the voice of New York, with its ceaseless reiteration of one theme, 'pay, pay, pay.' She turns desperately to her little accomplishments, those little, untrained, unskilful things that she can do, straws on that ocean; and expects them to save her. "Ah!" she drew her hand across her brow, her face contracting a moment. "Then comes the grind between the millstones, the continual disappointments, the terror by day and night, the rent, that rolls like a snowball, the dreary evenings which she must spend alone in the dreary little room, while all the time she hears the mocking invitation of the great, glittering city to partake of her many feasts.