ges.

There was something so novel, so sleepy, so harmless, so mediaeval, in
the Flemish life, that it soothed him. He had been swimming all his
life in salt sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull, canal water, mirroring
between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a
charm for him.

He stayed awhile in Antwerpen. The town is ugly and beautiful; it is like
a dull quaint gres de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside
its rim. It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and barter,
of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated leaves of
missal vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and heroic ballad,
that could only have been executed in the days when Art was a religion.

He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, whom before he had slighted,
never having known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd to
say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think that you have seen
Murillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied the
Gretchen carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved Scheffer;
but though he tried, he failed to care for her.

"She is only a peasant; she is not a poem," he said to himself; "I will
paint a Gretchen for the Salon of next year."

But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen. All his pictures were
Phryne,--Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a
bed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt of
jewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of the
dead-house under her naked limbs,--but always Phryne. Phryne, who living
had death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless had blank despair on her
face; Phryne, a thing that lived furiously every second of her days, but
Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion that never could live
again.

Phryne has many painters in this school, as many as Catherine and Cecilia
had in the schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.

How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer missed? Not even if,
like the artist monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent through in
holy water.

And in holy water he did not believe.

One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over the
grave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the casement of an absent
friend's old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary of
Burgundy; an old casement crusted with quaint carvings, and gilde