and there with myrtle-shoots and crimson snapdragon. In what was once
the highest enclosure of the fort, where your friend Gertrude watches
the maids hanging out the fine white sheets and pillow-cases to dry (a
bit of the North, of Hermann and Dorothea transferred to the South), a
great twisted fig-tree juts out like an eccentric gargoyle over the
sea, and drops its ripe fruit into the deep blue pools. There is but
scant furniture in the house, but a great oleander overhangs it,
presently to burst into pink splendor; and on all the window-sills,
even that of the kitchen (such a background of shining brass saucepans
Waldemar's wife has made of it!) are pipkins and tubs full of trailing
carnations, and tufts of sweet basil and thyme and mignonette. She
pleases me most, your Gertrude, although you foretold I should prefer
the husband; with her thin white face, a Memling Madonna finished by
some Tuscan sculptor, and her long, delicate white hands ever busy,
like those of a mediaeval lady, with some delicate piece of work; and
the strange blue, more limpid than the sky and deeper than the sea, of
her rarely lifted glance.

It is in her company that I like Waldemar best; I prefer to the genius
that infinitely tender and respectful, I would not say _lover_
--yet I have no other word--of his pale wife. He seems to me,
when with her, like some fierce, generous, wild thing from the
woods, like the lion of Una, tame and submissive to this saint.... This
tenderness is really very beautiful on the part of that big lion
Waldemar, with his odd eyes, as of some wild animal--odd, and, your
Excellency remarks, not without a gleam of latent ferocity. I think
that hereby hangs the explanation of his never doing any but male
figures: the female figure, he says (and your Excellency must hold him
responsible, not me, for such profanity), is almost inevitably inferior
in strength and beauty; woman is not form, but expression, and