d round
in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible
scutcheons.

Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and
paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and
Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go
into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens
and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet,--young
Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Caesar's kisses,--leaning
there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in
two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a
flower.

"There is my Gretchen," he thought to himself, and went down and followed
her into the cathedral. If he could get what was in her face, he would
get what Scheffer could not.

A little later walking by her in the green lanes, he meditated, "It is
the face of Gretchen, but not the soul--the Red Mouse has never passed
this child's lips. Nevertheless--"

"Nevertheless--" he said to himself, and smiled.

For he, the painter all his life long of Phryne living and of Phryne
dead, believed that every daughter of Eve either vomits the Red Mouse
or swallows it.

It makes so little difference which,--either way the Red Mouse has been
there the evening towards this little rush-covered hut, he forgot the Red
Mouse, and began vaguely to see that there are creatures of his mother's
sex from whom the beast of the Brocken slinks away.

But he still said to himself, "Nevertheless." "Nevertheless,"--for he
knew well that when the steel cuts the silk, when the hound hunts the
fawn, when the snake wooes the bird, when the king covets the vineyard,
there is only one end possible at any time. It is the strong against the
weak, the fierce against the feeble, the subtle against the simple, the
master against the slave; there is no equality in the contest and no
justice--it is merely inevitable, and the issue of it is written.

CHAPTER XI.

The next day she had her promised book hidden under the vine-leaves of
her empty basket as she went homeward, and though she had not seen him
very long or spoken to him very much, she was happy.

The golden gates of knowledge had just opened to her; she saw a faint,
far-off glimpse of the Hesperides gardens within; of the dragon she had
never heard, and had no fear.

"Might I know your name?" she had asked him wistfully, as she