through all his long life--he died recently at a very advanced
age--he at once put his work away and took her round his
studio to show her everything he thought would interest her.
But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by leaving
the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round
by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture.
Presently she made an exclamation, and turning they saw her
standing before a picture, a portrait of a girl, staring
fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was a cry of pain,
"was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears. She
had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had
come to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years,
and the story of it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great
artist to have her portrait painted, and when the work was at
length finished she and her mother went to see it. The artist
put it before them and the mother looked at it, her face
expressing displeasure, and said not one word. Nor did the
artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break the
uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?"
and the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long
as you hang it with the face to the wall." It was an
insolent, a cruel thing to say, but the artist did not answer
her bitterly; he said gently that she need not take the
portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case he
would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for
the work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he
never saw her again. And now Time, the humbler of proud
beautiful women, had given him his revenge: the portrait,