"Really," I cried, "you don't believe in his Madonna?"

"My dear ingenuous youth," rejoined my shrewd friend, "has he made a
convert of you? Well, we all believed in him once; he came down upon
Florence and took the town by storm. Another Raphael, at the very least,
had been born among men, and the poor dear United States were to have the
credit of him. Hadn't he the very hair of Raphael flowing down on his
shoulders? The hair, alas, but not the head! We swallowed him whole,
however; we hung upon his lips and proclaimed his genius on the house-
tops. The women were all dying to sit to him for their portraits and be
made immortal, like Leonardo's Joconde. We decided that his manner was a
good deal like Leonardo's--mysterious, and inscrutable, and fascinating.
Mysterious it certainly was; mystery was the beginning and the end of it.
The months passed by, and the miracle hung fire; our master never
produced his masterpiece. He passed hours in the galleries and churches,
posturing, musing, and gazing; he talked more than ever about the
beautiful, but he never put brush to canvas. We had all subscribed, as
it were, to the great performance; but as it never came off people began
to ask for their money again. I was one of the last of the faithful; I
carried devotion so far as to sit to him for my head. If you could have
seen the horrible creature he made of me, you would admit that even a
woman with no more vanity than will tie her bonnet straight must have
cooled off then. The man didn't know the very alphabet of drawing! His
strong point, he intimated, was his sentiment; but is it a consolation,
when one has been painted a fright, to know it has been done with
peculiar gusto? One by one, I confess, we fell away from the faith, and
Mr. Theobald didn't lift his little finger to preserve us. At the first
hint that we were tired of waiting, and that we should like the show to
begin, he was off in a huff. 'Great work requires time, contemplation,
privacy, mystery! O ye of little faith!' We answered that we didn't