r."

"The thing is simple enough, I have never found a beautiful woman who
claimed so little of a suitor as to be willing to take up with my
insignificant self; that is to say--for I despise alms--who could
seriously be satisfied with this drab-tinted sketch of a human figure
that bears my name. And as I am too ignorant of the art of making the
best of it, and seeking out a sweetheart who shall be suited to me in
all ways and shall bear the stamp of the same manufactory, I stand but
a poor chance so far as love is concerned. You will laugh at me,
Rossel, but, in solemn earnest, the Venus of Milo would not be
beautiful enough for me."

A short pause ensued. Then Rossel said: "If I understand you rightly, I
must confess that I don't understand you at all. Besides, your estimate
of woman is quite wrong. What you want is a husband; some one who shall
show you that she is lord and master, and not a mere puppet. Put aside
both your humility and your arrogance, and pitch in whenever you
stumble upon a cheerful life. However, do just as you see fit. Who
knows but what some time the Venus of Milo herself will take pity on
you for having passed over all lesser women-folk in order to wait for
the goddess?"

"And what if she has already appeared to me, ay, has visited me day by
day up there above the tree-tops?" said Kohle, with a mysterious smile.

He pointed with his hand toward the studio, whose window sparkled
softly in the starlight.

Rossel stared at him in amazement.

"You fear I am on the point of breaking into a divine frenzy," laughed
the little man. "But I haven't yet confounded dreams and reality. That
I have seen her, and have learned from her all sorts of things that
other mortals do not yet know, is certain. But I believe myself that I
only dreamed all this. It was on my very first morning out here. The
evening before I had been reading the _Last Centaur_. The birds woke me
very early, and then I lay for a few hours with closed eyes, and the
whole story passed before me in a continuous train."

"What story?"

"I am now at work sketching it, after my own fashion, against which you
will protest again. There is a cyclus of six or eight pictures--shall I
tell you the story just as I am building it up in outline? It ought
properly to be told in verse, but I am no poet. Enough, the scene opens
with a mountain-cliff somewhere or other, the Hoesselberg, let us say,
or any other mythological fastness in which a godd