Now, for the first time, Hermon heard him speak.  He could not deny that his voice was unusually pleasant in tone, yet it unmistakably issued from the lips of a sufferer.

The brief questions with which he received the blind artist were kindly, and as natural as though addressing an equal, and every remark made in connection with Hermon’s answers revealed a very quick and keen intellect.

He had seen the Demeter, and praised the conception of the goddess because it corresponded with her nature.  The sanctity which, as it were, pervaded the figure of the divine woman pleased him, because it made the supplicants in the temple feel that they were in the presence of a being who was elevated far above them in superhuman majesty.

“True,” he added, “your Demeter is by no means a powerful helper in time of need.  She is a goddess such as Epicurus imagines the immortals.  Without interfering with human destiny, she stands above it in sublime grandeur and typical dignity.  You belong, if I see correctly, to the Epicureans?”

“No,” replied Hermon.  “Like my lord and King, I, too, number myself among the pupils of the wise Straton.”

“Indeed?” asked Ptolemy in a drawling tone, at the same time casting a glance of astonishment at the blind man’s powerful figure and well-formed, intellectual face.  Then he went on eagerly:  “I shall scarcely be wrong in the inference that you, the creator of the Fig-eater, had experienced a far-reaching mental change before your unfortunate loss of sight?”

“I had to struggle hard,” replied Hermon, “but I probably owe the success of the Demeter to the circumstance that I found a model whose mind and nature correspond with those of the goddess to a rare degree.”

The monarch shook his fair head, and protested in a tone of positive superior knowledge:  “As to the model, however well selected it may be, it was not well chosen for this work, far less for you.  I have watched your battle against beauty in behalf of truth, and rejoiced, though I often saw you and your little band of young disciples shoot beyond the mark.  You brought something new, whose foundation seemed to me sound, and on which further additions might be erected.  When the excrescences fell off, I thought, this Hermon, his shadow Soteles, and the others who follow him will perhaps open new paths to the declining art which is constantly going back to former days.  Our time will become the point of departure of a new art.  But for that very reason, let me confess it, I regret to see you fall back from your bold advance.  You now claim for your work that it cleaves strictly to Nature, because the model is taken from life itself.  It does not become me to doubt this, yet the stamp of divinity which your Demeter bears is found in no mortal woman.  Understand me correctly!  This is certainly no departure from the truth, for the ideal often deserves this lofty name better than anything the visible world