A portrait appeals so intimately to the personality of the person represented, human vanity and individuality insist so strongly upon regarding it as a part of self, that it stands in a closer relation to the inner being than can almost any other outward thing. It is, in a sense, part of the original, and perhaps the oriental prejudice against being portrayed, lest in the process the artist may obtain some sinister advantage, is founded upon some subtle truth. It can hardly be possible that, with the keen feeling every man must have in regard to his portrait, any one should fail to be more or less influenced by the painter's conception of him, the visible embodiment of the impression he has made upon another human mind; and since every picture must contain something of the personality of the artist, it follows that a portrait-painter is sure to affect in some degree the character of his sitters. It would rarely happen that this influence would be either intentional or tangible, but must it not always exist? Claymore stood for a little time watching Ralph's face; then he walked away, and returned with a small mirror which he put in the latter's hand. Thatcher looked at the reflection it offered him, and broke into a hard laugh. "By George!" he said; "it does look like me. I never realized before that I was such a whelp." "Fiddlesticks!" Claymore rejoined briskly, taking the glass from him. "Don't talk nonsense. Take your place and let's get to work." IV On the afternoon of the same day Celia came into the studio with her face clouded. She received her lover's greetings in an absent-minded fashion, and almost before the musical tinkle of the zither on the door which admitted her had died away, she asked abruptly:-- "What in the world have you been doing to Ralph?" "I? Nothing but painting him. Why?" "Because he came down here this morning in a perfectly heavenly frame of mind. He has been in Boston to see about some repairs on his tenement-houses at the North End that I've been teasing him to make ever since the first of my being there last winter; and he came in this morning to say he thought I was right, and he was going to take hold and do what I wanted." "Well?" questioned Tom, as she broke off with a gesture of impatience. "And after he 'd been down here for his sitting, he came back so cross and strange; and said he'd reconsidered, and he did n't see why he should bother his head about the worthless wretches in the slums. I can't see what came over him." "But why should you hold me responsible for your cousin's vagaries?" "Oh, of course you are not," Celia replied, with a trace of petulance in her tone; "but I am so dreadfully disappointed. Ralph has always put the whole thing off before, and now I thought he had really waked up." "Probably," Claymore suggested, "it is some new phase of his ill-starred love affair." Miss Sathman flushed to her temples.