and must do with the animal woman.”  He made a cup of his hands as if to dip up water.  “I feel my Madonna in the hollow of my hands like a homunculus.  She is alive there.  The palms of my hands are warm.  They are a golden shell.  Conceive my Madonna to be a hand’s breadth high, of live ivory, and imagine some rosy flecks here and there on her.  Imagine her robed in the garments that Godiva wore, that is, nothing but her hair of flowing sunbeams, and so on, and so on.”  Frederick began to improvise poetry.

  “Said the master:  ‘Come into my workshop.’ 
   And he took, like unto the Creator,
   God! in both his hands a little image,
   And his heart with mighty throb vibrated. 
   ‘As thou seest it, once I saw it living.’ 
                                   And so on, and so on.

   Over my hands
   Flowed golden wavelets,
   Cool, sweet lips and—­

I’ll say no more.  I’ll merely add that I should like to carve that Madonna in German linden-wood and give her all the colours of life itself, and then die, for all I care.”

Frederick’s enthusiastic outburst was received with great applause.

Eva Burns was a beautiful young woman of over twenty-five years, imposing and perhaps somewhat masculine in appearance.  Her German was rather hard, suggesting to a hypercritical person that her tongue was too thick for her mouth, like a parrot’s.  Her abundant hair was parted in the middle and drawn over her ears.  Her figure was broad, stately, and perfectly formed.  While Frederick spoke, and even after he had done speaking, she looked at him with searching interest in her large, intelligent, meditative eyes.  Finally she said: 

“You really ought to try to do it.”

Eva Burns was one of those knowing, companionable women that are always welcome and never disturbing in a company of men.  Her eyes and Frederick’s eyes met, and the young scholar answered her in a tone of mixed raillery and gallantry: 

“Miss—­Miss—­”

“Burns,” Willy helped him, “Miss Burns from Birmingham.”

“Miss Burns from Birmingham, you said something of great significance.  On you be the blame if the world is impoverished by the loss of a poor physician and enriched by the addition of a poor sculptor.”

It had grown dark, and they lighted three large candles of the finest bee’s wax in the chandelier above the table.

“I have no objections,” Schmidt several times interjected in the debate, “I have no objections to your trying to help toward the evolution of sublimer types by means of divine intelligence and human hands; for all I care, by means of divine intelligence alone, that is, by means of reason.  The very same, if you will allow it, is the object, the ultimate object, of the science of medicine.  A day is coming when artificial selection among human beings will be obligatory.”  The artists burst out laughing, but Schmidt continued unabashed.  “And another day, a still more beautiful day, is coming when persons like ourselves will be considered like, well, let us say at the utmost, the African Bushmen.”