Wholly to disbelieve in its own inspirations is, however, hardly within the power of the genuinely imaginative nature. Whatever his understanding might argue, Tom, in the end, would have been false to his temperament had he not remained convinced that he was right in believing that to some degree, at least, the picture he was painting had influenced his sitter. Without any consciously defined plan, he got out a fresh canvas, and occupied himself, when alone in the studio, by copying Ralph's head, but with a difference. As in the other picture he had endeavored to express all the noblest possibilities of the young man's face, in this he labored to portray whatever potentiality of evil might be found there. Every introspective person has experienced the sensation of feeling that a course of action is being followed as if by some inner direction, yet without any clear consciousness of the reason; and much as might have come a hint of the intentions or motives of another person, came to Tom the thought that he was painting this second portrait that its difference from the first might show him upon what foundations rested his fanciful theory. He wished, he told himself, at least to see how far he had expressed a personality unlike another equally possible. As a faint shade on the artist's inner consciousness rested, however, a feeling that this explanation was not completely satisfactory. He would have been shocked had he even dreamed of the possibility that artistic vanity, aroused by the doubt that it possessed the power of moulding the life and destiny of Ralph, had defiantly turned to throw its influence into the other scale, to prove by its power of dragging the sitter down that its dominance was real. Had any realization of such a motive come to Claymore, he would have been horrified at a thought so evil; yet he failed to push self-investigation far enough to bring him to an understanding of his real motives.