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.
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