therefore suits painting, but not sculpture. The point of a woman is
not her body, but (and here his eyes rested very tenderly upon the thin
white profile of his wife) her soul. "Still," I answered, "the
ancients, who understood such matters, did manufacture some tolerable
female statues: the Fates of the Parthenon, the Phidian Pallas, the
Venus of Milo."...

"Ah! yes," exclaimed Waldemar, smiling, with that savage gleam of his
eyes; "but those are not women, and the people who made them have left
as the tales of Endymion, Adonis, Anchises: a goddess might sit for
them."...

_May 5, 1887._

Has it ever struck your Excellency in one of your La Rochefoucauld fits
(in Lent say, after too many balls) that not merely maternal but
conjugal unselfishness may be a very selfish thing? There! you toss
your little head at my words; yet I wager I have heard you say that
_other_ women may think it right to humor their husbands, but as
to you, the Prince must learn that a wife's duty is as much to chasten
her husband's whims as to satisfy them. I really do feel indignant that
such a snow-white saint should wish another woman to part with all
instincts of modesty merely because that other woman would be a good
model for her husband; really it is intolerable. "Leave the girl
alone," Waldemar said, laughing. "What do I want with the unaesthetic
sex, as Schopenhauer calls it?" But Gertrude has set her heart on his
doing a female figure; it seems that folk have twitted him with never
having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for
him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the
more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our