Her stranger from Rubes’ land was a great man in a certain world.  He had become great when young, which is perhaps a misfortune.  It indisposes men to be great at their maturity.  He was famous at twenty, by a picture hectic in color, perfect in drawing, that made Paris at his feet.  He became more famous by verses, by plays, by political follies, and by social successes.  He was faithful, however, to his first love in art.  He was a great painter, and year by year proved afresh the cunning of his hand.  Purists said his pictures had no soul in them.  It was not wonderful if they had none.  He always painted soulless vice; indeed, he saw very little else.

One year he had some political trouble.  He wrote a witty pamphlet that hurt where it was perilous to aim.  He laughed and crossed the border, riding into the green Ardennes one sunny evening.  He had a name of some power and sufficient wealth; he did not feel long exile.  Meanwhile he told himself he would go and look at Scheffer’s Gretchen.

The King of Thule is better; but people talk most of the Gretchen.  He had never seen either.

He went in leisurely, travelling up the bright Meuse River, and across the monotony of the plains, then green with wheat a foot high, and musical with the many bells of the Easter kermesses in the quaint old-world villages.

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.