END OF THE LOST SON.

THE FAIR KATE.

THE FAIR KATE.

"It is incontestably true," said the old landscape-painter B----,
slowly stroking down his grey or rather mouse-coloured beard, "women
will be women, that is, sex dominates in the best as in the worst; and
though they are often obstinate enough in taking things into their
head, yet after all it is but seldom a head with any special or
original character, is only a feminine head. A genuine individuality
that can be measured by itself alone is far more rare among them than
among us men, and positively I do not know if the fact gives us
anything to boast of. Very often our peculiarity is only peculiar
folly--a departure from nature, whether through culture or mutilation;
while women, for whose training or spoiling less is done from without,
seldom become unnatural either in good or evil, seldom exceed the
average. But when they do so I have always found something to marvel
at.

"For instance one case remains indelibly fixed on my memory, when I
actually witnessed a thing unheard of and unparalleled, a lovely girl
who had an actual hatred of her own beauty, not merely a conceited,
coquettish, pretended indifference to it, or even an over-strained,
saintly, nun-like renunciation of it, but what one might call an
honourable enmity against it, which had, indeed, its good grounds.

"I became acquainted with the story in question in the following way.

"At that time--it's now more than twenty years ago--I was very intimate
with a long-forgotten Dutch painter, Jan van Kuylen or Kuyden--you will
not find the name in any catalogue of known artists.

"In the course of the usual journey to Rome, he had remained hanging
about Munich, the real reason being that Raphael and Michael Angelo
were secretly oppressive to him, crushed his own small personality, and
disgusted him with the neat Dutch style by which he made a good deal of
money. He was a curious fellow, the oddest mixture of humour and
phlegm, ideality and cynicism, sentimental tendencies and caustic
irony. And so, too, in his studio you found the oddest medley; there
were exquisite specimens of Venetian glass for which he had a great
love, costly instruments inlaid with silver and mother of pearl, for he
played the guitar and lute well; then again on some heavily embroidered
cloth you would see a tin-plate with bits of cheese-rind, or a qua