acing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the
chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:

"With soul to help if the mere lips failed,
I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,
Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips
Still from one's soulless finger-tips."

This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on
it, by which one knows

"That here at length a master found
His match, a proud lone soul its mate."

Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty--

". . . how free, how fine
To fear almost!--of the limit-line."

_He_, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in
which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew,
Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.
She will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is
not the same as Da Vinci's.

"Little girl with the poor coarse hand"

. . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.
Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing
like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."

But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak
with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the
Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her,
laugh her woes to scorn.

"The fool forsooth is all forlorn
Because the beauty she thinks best
Lived long ago or was never born,
Because no beauty bears the test
In this rough peasant hand!"

It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent
years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness,
but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use

"Of flesh and bone and nerve that make
The poorest coarsest human hand
An object worthy to be scanned
A whole life long for their sole sake."

Just the hand--and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson
of life--this incompleteness?

"Now the parts and then the whole!"

And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she,
with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.
No beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:

"'What use survives the beauty?'"

Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.

Then _this