who seemed to be sleeping. She obeyed her motherly impulse to
encourage Polykarp with some loving words, and climbing up the narrow
stair that led to the roof, she went into his room. Surprised,
irresolute, and speechless she stood for some time behind the young man,
and looked at the strongly illuminated and beautiful features of the
newly-formed bust, which was only too like its well-known prototype. At
last she laid her hand on her son's shoulder, and spoke his name.
Polykarp stepped back, and looked at his mother in bewilderment, like a
man roused from sleep; but she interrupted the stammering speech with
which he tried to greet her, by saying, gravely and not without severity,
as she pointed to the statue, "What does this mean?"

"What should it mean, mother?" answered Polykarp in a low tone, and
shaking his head sadly. "Ask me no more at present, for if you gave me no
rest, and even if I tried to explain to you how to-day--this very day--I
have felt impelled and driven to make this woman's image, still you could
not understand me--no, nor any one else."

"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