have laid bare the soul of a woman as with a scalpel.

Naturally their faith is shaken. They feel that a man like that cannot
possibly know anything about Woman or any other subject except where
to go for a vegetarian lunch, and the next moment they have put down
the hair-pin and the child is seven-and-six in hand and the author his
ten per cent., or whatever it is, to the bad. And all because of a
photograph.

For the ordinary man, the recent introduction of high-art methods into
photography has done much to diminish the unpleasantness of the
operation. In the old days of crude and direct posing, there was no
escape for the sitter. He had to stand up, backed by a rustic stile
and a flabby canvas sheet covered with exotic trees, glaring straight
into the camera. To prevent any eleventh-hour retreat, a sort of spiky
thing was shoved firmly into the back of his head leaving him with the
choice of being taken as he stood or having an inch of steel jabbed
into his skull. Modern methods have changed all that.

There are no photographs nowadays. Only "camera portraits" and "lens
impressions." The full face has been abolished. The ideal of the
present-day photographer is to eliminate the sitter as far as possible
and concentrate on a general cloudy effect. I have in my possession
two studies of my Uncle Theodore--one taken in the early 'nineties,
the other in the present year. The first shows him, evidently in pain,
staring before him with a fixed expression. In his right hand he
grasps a scroll. His left rests on a moss-covered wall. Two sea-gulls
are flying against a stormy sky.

As a likeness, it is almost brutally exact. My uncle stands forever