Over a man of this nature woman holds a more important influence than with any other class; it may be a good influence or it may be a harmful one, but it is the most potent one which touches his life. Had John Graham loved happily at twenty-five, instead of most miserably, he would have been a very different man at thirty from the hermit artist of San Rosario. It would have been better for him if he could have learned the lesson which all wise men learn if they live long enough,--that women are neither angels who stand immeasurably above men, nor inferior beings whose place is at their feet, but human like themselves, full of good and faulty instincts, and, with all their imperfections, the God-given helpmates of man. So justly should they be judged; and if a little mercy be claimed for them, generosity should not deny it, so few are their chances in life compared with those of their brothers. A woman has but one possibility of happiness in this world. The stakes are high on which she risks her whole fortune, which she may lose by one unredeemable throw. If Graham could have known all this, as, being what he was, he could not, he would have gained that one element which his genius lacked to make it superlative. Man and child he was by turns, but never for an instant had he been able to look at life from the standpoint of a woman. He had once loved the whole gentler sex with that chivalrous spirit which made him unfit to live in the nineteenth century. No discourteous or cruel word toward any woman had he to reproach himself with; he had looked upon them as creatures so far removed from his sphere, that his mind must be cleared of every base thought before it might dwell upon them; they were mysterious angels which it was his happiness to worship. Then came a change, and the love which had turned to grief darkened his soul. As his heart had been filled with a love so great that it embraced all the sisters of his idol, his contempt went out towards them, as his love had done before. His revenge had been terrible: he had struck at womankind; he had pictured it in its debasement for all the world to see. The few women for whom he cared were elderly people, whose life-battles had been fought and won; who sat enthroned in the calm of that peaceful period when youth is no longer regretted nor old age feared. Such women he could paint without bitterness; and his portrait of his mother was a masterpiece of exquisite sentiment. No woman that he had ever met disliked John Graham; if he was distant and cold, he was honest and courteous, and a gentleman in the deepest sense of the word. He was too chivalrous to revenge himself on any individual; his grief was too great to stoop to anything so mean. More than one woman would gladly have loved him, but he avoided them as if they had been poison-nurtured.