Intellectually, humanity cleaves to idolatry; and each of us worships in the Pantheon, where our favorite divinities in literature crowd the niches.  To become a skilful artist, and paint the portrait of Antigone, vas the ambition that had shaped and colored Beryl’s young dreams, long ere she suspected that a mournful parallelism in fate would consign her to a living tomb more intolerable than that devised by Theban Creon.

Our grandest pictures, statues, poems, are not the canvas, the marble, the bronze, and the gilded vellum, that the world handles, criticises, weighs, buys and sells, accepts with praise, or rejects with anathema.  Invisible and inviolate, imagination, keeps our best, our ideals, locked in the cerebrum cells of “gray matter”, which we are pleased to call our workshop.

What art gallery, what library can rival the sublime and beautiful images that crowd the creased and folded labyrinth of the human brain; as far beyond the ken and analysis of the biologist’s microscope, as some remote nebulae shining in blue gulfs of interstellar space, that no telescopic Jense can ever discover, even as a faint blur of silvery mist upon the black velvet vault that suns and planets spangle?

In some degree, Beryl’s artistic dream had been realized; and the study of years slowly flowered into a large painting, which represented Antigone standing beside the heap of dust, strewn reverently to sepulchre the form dimly outlined at her feet.  The sullen red sunset of a tempestuous day flared from the horizon, across a desolate plain; showed the city walls in the background, the hungry vultures poised high above the dead, the marauding dogs crouched in the wind-swept sand, watching their banquet, decreed by the king.  The dust had been scattered from a black vase that bore on its front, in a circular medallion, the lurid head of grinning Hecate; and the last rite to appease the unquiet manes was performed by the uplifted right arm that poured libations from a burnished brass urn, held aloft over the pall of earth that denned the figure beneath.  The left hand was stretched, not heavenward, but shieldingly over the mound, and in the beautiful, stern face bent a little downward in invocation of the infernal gods, one read sublime self-surrender, grief for Oedipus, regret for Hasmon, farewell to life,—­mingled with exultant consciousness that a successful sacrifice had been accomplished for Polynices, and that the spirit of the brother rested in peace.

The soul of the artist seemed to look triumphantly through the solemn, purplish blue eyes of the young martyr, and Beryl knew that her own heart beat under the pamted folds of the diploidion; that she had epitomized in a symbolic picture, the history of her own joyless youth.

The canvas had been framed and hung at the art exhibition of the new “Museum”, opened in September; and only the “U” traced in one corner beneath an anchor, indicated that it was the work of the Umilta Sisters’ “Anchorage”.