“Let him think what he likes, my fairy.  We are not trying to catch him for a husband.  I am sure he would not want one of those monsters who are known as female artists.  He would think he was marrying the devil.  You are quite right, Minerva.  Art is a despot.  One has to give one’s self entirely up to him.  To toil in his service, one devotes all the ideal, all the energy, honesty, conscience, that one possesses, so that you have none of these things left for real life, and the completed labour throws you down, strengthless and without a compass, like a dismantled hulk at the mercy of every wave.  A sorry acquisition, such a wife!”

“And yet,” the young man hazarded timidly, “it seems to me that art, however exigent it be, cannot for all that entirely absorb a woman.  What would she do with her affections, of that need to love, to devote herself, which in her, much more than in us, is the spring of all her actions?”

She mused a moment before replying.

“Perhaps you are right, wise Minerva.  It is true that there are days when my life rings terribly hollow.  I am conscious of abysses, profound chasms in it.  Everything that I throw in to fill it up disappears.  My finest enthusiasms of the artist are engulfed there and die each time in a sigh.  And then I think of marriage.  A husband; children—­a swarm of children, who would roll about the studio; a nest to look after for them all; the satisfaction of that physical activity which is lacking in our existences of artists; regular occupations; high spirits, songs, innocent gaieties, which would oblige you to play instead of thinking in the air, in the dark—­to laugh at a wound to one’s self-love, to be only a contented mother on the day when the public should see you as a worn-out, exhausted artist.”

And before this tender vision the girl’s beauty took on an expression which Paul had never seen in it before, an expression which gripped his whole being, and gave him a mad longing to carry off in his arms that beautiful wild bird, dreaming of the home-cote, to protect and shelter it in the sure love of an honest man.

She, without looking at him, continued: 

“I am not so erratic as I appear; don’t think it.  Ask my good godmother if, when she sent me to boarding-school, I did not observe the rules.  But what a muddle in my life afterward.  If you knew what sort of an early youth I had; how precocious an experience tarnished my mind, in the head of the little girl I was, what a confusion of the permitted and the forbidden, of reason and folly!  Art alone, extolled and discussed, stood out boldly from among it all, and I took refuge in it.  That is perhaps why I shall never be anything but an artist, a woman apart from others, a poor Amazon with heart imprisoned in her iron cuirass, launched into the conflict like a man, and as a man condemned to live and die.”

Why did he not say to her, at this: 

“Beauteous lady-warrior, lay down your arms, resume the flowing robe and the graces of the woman’s sphere.  I love you!  Marry me, I implore you, and win happiness both for yourself and for me.”