“God forbid that I should ever understand it!” cried Dorothea. “’Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,’ was the commandment of the Lord on this mountain.  And you?  You think I could not understand you?  Who should understand you then, if not your mother?  This I certainly do not comprehend, that a son of Petrus and of mine should have thrown all the teaching and the example of his parents so utterly to the wind.  But what you are aiming at with this statue, it seems to me is not hard to guess.  As the forbidden-fruit hangs too high for you, you degrade your art, and make to yourself an image that resembles her according to your taste.  Simply and plainly it comes to this; as you can no longer see the Gaul’s wife in her own person, and yet cannot exist without the sweet presence of the fair one, you make a portrait of clay to make love to, and you will carry on idolatry before it, as once the Jews did before the golden calf and the brazen serpent.”

Polykarp submitted to his mother’s angry blame in silence, but in painful emotion.  Dorothea had never before spoken to him thus, and to hear such words from the very lips which were used to address him with such heart-felt tenderness, gave him unspeakable pain.  Hitherto she had always been inclined to make excuses for his weaknesses and little faults, nay, the zeal with which she had observed and pointed out his merits and performances before strangers as well as before their own family, had often seemed to him embarrassing.  And now?  She had indeed reason to blame him, for Sirona was the wife of another, she had never even noticed his admiration, and now, they all said, had committed a crime for the sake of a stranger.  It must seem both a mad and a sinful thing in the eyes of men that he of all others should sacrifice the best he had—­his Art—­and how little could Dorothea, who usually endeavored to understand him, comprehend the overpowering impulse which had driven him to his task.

He loved and honored his mother with his whole heart, and feeling that she was doing herself an injustice by her false and low estimate of his proceedings, he interrupted her eager discourse, raising his hands imploringly to her.

“No, mother, no!” he exclaimed.  “As truly as God is my helper, it is not so.  It is true that I have moulded this head, but not to keep it, and commit the sin of worshipping it, but rather to free myself from the image that stands before my mind’s eye by day and by night, in the city and in the desert, whose beauty distracts my mind when I think, and my devotions when I try to pray.  To whom is it given to read the soul of man?  And is not Sirona’s form and face the loveliest image of the Most High?  So to represent it, that the whole charm that her presence exercises over me might also be felt by every beholder, is a task that I have set myself ever since her arrival in our house.  I had to go back to the capital, and the work I longed to achieve took a clearer form;