rest, she was an Innocentina, that is to say, a foundling; then she
began to sing:--

"Flower of the myrtle!
My father is the starry sky,
The mother that made me is the sea."

_June 22, 1887_.

I confess I was an old fool to have grudged Waldemar his model. As I
watch him gradually building up his statue, watch the goddess gradually
emerging from the clay heap, I ask myself--and the case might trouble a
more subtle moralist than me--whether a village girl, an obscure,
useless life within the bounds of what we choose to call right and
wrong, can be weighed against the possession by mankind of a great work
of art, a Venus immortally beautiful? Still, I am glad that the two
alternatives need not be weighed against each other. Nothing can equal
the kindness of Gertrude, now that Dionea has consented to sit to her
husband; the girl is ostensibly merely a servant like any other; and,
lest any report of her real functions should get abroad and discredit
her at San Massimo or Montemirto, she is to be taken to Rome, where no
one will be the wiser, and where, by the way, your Excellency will have
an opportunity of comparing Waldemar's goddess of love with our little
orphan of the Convent of the Stigmata. What reassures me still more is
the curious attitude of Waldemar towards the girl. I could never have
believed that an artist could regard a woman so utterly as a mere
inanimate thing, a form to copy, like a tree or flower. Truly he
carries out his theory that sculpture knows only the body, and the body
scarcely considered as human. The way in which he speaks to Dionea
after hours of the most rapt contemplation of her is almost brutal in