three fairies."...

Dionea droned out the story in her half-Genoese dialect, her eyes
looking far away across the blue sea, dotted with sails like white
sea-gulls, that strange serpentine smile on her lips.

"Who told thee that fable?" I asked.

She took a handful of oleander-blossoms from the ground, and throwing
them in the air, answered listlessly, as she watched the little shower
of rosy petals descend on her black hair and pale breast--

"Who knows?"

_July 6, 1887_.

How strange is the power of art! Has Waldemar's statue shown me the
real Dionea, or has Dionea really grown more strangely beautiful than
before? Your Excellency will laugh; but when I meet her I cast down my
eyes after the first glimpse of her loveliness; not with the shyness of
a ridiculous old pursuer of the Eternal Feminine, but with a sort of
religious awe--the feeling with which, as a child kneeling by my
mother's side, I looked down on the church flags when the Mass bell
told the elevation of the Host.... Do you remember the story of Zeuxis
and the ladies of Crotona, five of the fairest not being too much for
his Juno? Do you remember--you, who have read everything--all the bosh
of our writers about the Ideal in Art? Why, here is a girl who
disproves all this nonsense in a minute; she is far, far more beautiful
than Waldemar's statue of her. He said so angrily, only yesterday, when
his wife took me into his studio (he has made a studio of the