“Why not?” the girl interrupted.  “My father is just, the king is an incorruptible connoisseur, and certainly yesterday evening you, too, believed the others to be honest men; as for your fellow-candidate Myrtilus, he will no more grudge a prize to you than to himself.”

“Why should he?” asked Hermon, as if he, too, was perfectly sure of his friend.  “We have shared many a bit of bread together.  When we determined upon this competition each knew the other’s ability.  Your father commissioned us to create peaceful Demeter, the patroness of agriculture, peace, marriage, and Arachne, the mortal who was the most skilful of spinners; for he is both a grain dealer and owner of spinning factories.  The best Demeter is to be placed in the Alexandrian temple of the goddess, to whose priestesses you belong; the less successful one in your own house in the city, but whose Demeter is destined for the sanctuary, I repeat, is now virtually decided.  Myrtilus will add this prize to the others, and grant me with all his heart the one for the Arachne.  The subject, at any rate, is better adapted to my art than to his, and so I should be tolerably certain of my cause.  Yet my anxiety about the verdict of the judges remains, for surely you know how much the majority are opposed to my tendency.  I, and the few Alexandrians who, following me, sacrifice beauty to truth, swim against the stream which bears you, Myrtilus, and those who are on your side, smoothly along.  I know that you do it from thorough conviction, but with other acknowledged great artists and our judges, you, too, demand beauty—­always beauty.  Am I right, or wrong?  Is not any one who refuses to follow in the footsteps left by the ancients of Athens as certain of condemnation as the convicted thief or murderer?  But I will not follow the lead of the Athenians, inimitably great though they are in their own way, because I would fain be more than the ancients of Ilissus:  a disciple and an Alexandrian.”

“The never-ending dispute,” Myrtilus answered his fellow-artist, with a cordiality in which, nevertheless, there was a slight accent of pity.

“Surely you know it, Daphne.  To me the ideal and its embodiment within the limits of the natural, according to the models of Phidias, Polycletus, and Myron is the highest goal, but he and his co-workers seek objects nearer at hand.”

“Or rather we found them,” cried Hermon, interrupting his companion with angry positiveness.  “The city of Alexandria, which is growing with unprecedented vigour, is their home.  There, the place to which every race on earth sends a representative, the pulse of the whole world is throbbing.  There, whoever does not run with the rest is run over; there, but one thing is important—­actual life.  Science has undertaken to fathom it, and the results which it gains with measures and numbers is of a different value and more lasting than that which the idle sport of the intellects of the older philosophers obtained.