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 gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible scutcheons.

Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet,—­young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Caesar’s kisses,—­leaning there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a flower.

“There is my Gretchen,” he thought to himself, and went down and followed her into the cathedral.  If he could get what was in her face, he would get what Scheffer could not.

A little later walking by her in the green lanes, he meditated, “It is the face of Gretchen, but not the soul—­the Red Mouse has never passed this child’s lips.  Nevertheless—­”

“Nevertheless—­” he said to himself, and smiled.

For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne living and of Phryne dead, believed that every daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse or swallows it.

It makes so little difference which,—­either way the Red Mouse has been there the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the Red Mouse, and began vaguely to see that there are creatures of his mother’s sex from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks away.

But he still said to himself, “Nevertheless.”  “Nevertheless,”—­for he knew well that when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king covets the vineyard, there is only one end possible at any time.  It is the strong against the weak, the fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the simple, the master against the slave; there is no equality in the contest and no justice—­it is merely inevitable, and the issue of it is written.

CHAPTER XI.

The next day she had her promised book hidden under the vine-leaves of her empty basket as she went homeward, and though she had not seen him very long or spoken to him very much, she was happy.