"'What!' I cried, and the solution of the mystery flashed across me; 'he has then--you have not sat to him once for it?' "'I!' she cried, with all the offended dignity of a little queen. 'I do not so much as know what it looks like. I have only been told of it by my landlady, who has not herself seen it, but an officer, to whom she carried back a uniform yesterday evening, said to her: "Your lodger, the pretty girl, who is so vastly coy whenever one comes to propose anything to her, and always locks herself up, does not seem to be so inaccessible to civilians; there she is at the exhibition, painted just as God made her; to be sure Dutch ducats are more valuable than our uniform buttons." At this the tailor's wife asked further questions, and told me again all that she learnt. She herself is quite furious, and never would have believed it of Herr van Kuylen. And all because I had refused to go again to his studio after he had come the third day of Whitsuntide to pay me a visit, when he knew I should be alone with the children, and made me an offer of marriage in French that Babette might not understand him; for which very reason I answered in German that I did not mean to marry, and that he knew very well why, and that now after his declaration I could no longer sit to him as he must perfectly understand. But he seemed to understand nothing, he was like a maniac, and I had great difficulty to get him out of the room at all, for he always broke out anew, now with jests, now with the most fearful adjurations. Since then I have never spoken a word to him, nor let him in when he knocked at my door, and in the street I always got out of the way so speedily, that he could have no hope at all. And then what does he go and do? Out of revenge and wickedness he puts me as it were in the pillory, so that every one may point their finger at me, and I no longer dare look up in the presence of respectable women. Oh, what men are! And I had thought that he, at least, was an exception, because he did not prate, and had a kind of appearance which was not likely to lead any one into folly and shame for his sake. Now I have had to pay for my stupid confidence by the misery of my whole life.' "Then again she burst into tears. "I now attempted to comfort her, and also to defend my friend Jan, by representing to her that painters think very differently on these matters to what ladies do; that he had most certainly not done it out of revenge; and that she could lose nothing in the eyes of any rational beings if this picture--like all the rest of Van Kuylen's--were destined for the gallery of some Amsterdam merchant, who knew as little of the existence of 'the fair Kate,' as she did of his.