offers to the eye; but hitherto you have done honour to another truth.  If I comprehend your art aright, its essence is opposed to the addition of superhuman dignity and beauty, with which you, or the model you used, strove to ennoble and deify your Demeter.  Admirably as you succeeded in doing so, it forces your work out of the sphere of reality, whose boundary I never before saw you cross by a single inch.  Whether this occurred unconsciously to you in an hour of mental ecstasy, or whether you felt that you still lacked the means to represent the divine, and therefore returned to the older methods, I do not venture to decide.  But at the first examination of your work I was conscious of one thing:  It means for you a revolution, a rupture with your former aspirations; and as—­I willingly confess it—­you had been marvellously successful, it would have driven you, had your sight been spared, out of your own course and into the arms of the ancients, perhaps to your material profit, but scarcely to the advantage of art, which needs a renewal of its vital energies.”

“Let me assure you, my lord,” Hermon protested, “that had I remained able to continue to create, the success of the Demeter would never, never have rendered me faithless to the conviction and method of creation which I believed right; nay, before losing my sight, my whole soul was absorbed in a new work which would have permitted me to remain wholly and completely within the bounds of reality.”

“The Arachne?” asked the King.

“Yes, my lord,” cried Hermon ardently.  “With its completion I expected to render the greatest service, not only to myself, but to the cause of truth.”

Here Ptolemy interrupted with icy coldness:  “Yet you were certainly wrong; at least, if the Thracian Althea, who is the personification of falsehood, had continued to be the model.”  Then he changed his tone, and with the exclamation:  “You are protected from the needs of life, unless your rich uncle throws his property into the most insatiable of gulfs.  May Straton’s philosophy help you better to sustain your courage in the darkness which surrounds you than it has aided me to bear other trials!” he left the room.

Thus ended the artist’s conversation with the King, from which Hermon had expected such great results and, deeply agitated, he ordered the driver of his horses to take him to Daphne.  She was the only person to whom he could confide what disappointment this interview had caused him.

Others had previously reproached him, as the King had just done, with having, in the Demeter, become faithless to his artistic past.  How false and foolish this was!  Many a remark from the critics would have been better suited to Myrtilus’s work than to his.  Yet his fear in Tennis had not been true.  Only Daphne’s sweet face did not suit his more vigorous method of emphasizing distinctions.

What a many-hued chameleon was the verdict upon works of plastic art!  Once—­on his return to the capital—­thousands had united in the same one, and now how widely they differed again!