Yet I am unable to accept Woltmann's theory that the drawing was made in 1522 "for" the Virgin. He assumes that the lettering which borders the bodice in this drawing--ALS. IN. ERN. ALS. IN....--and the braids in which the hair is worn are simply some "fancy" dress. But surely if ever hair bore the stamp of unstudied, even ugly custom, it does so here. Then, too, Woltmann himself, as are all who adopt this explanation, is unable to reconcile the oldest age which can be assigned to this sitter with the youngest that can be assumed for the Basel painting of 1529 upon a hypothesis of only seven years' interval. Temperament and trouble can do much in seven years; but not so much as this. I say _temperament_ advisedly; because all the evidence of Holbein's life substantiates the assertion of Van Mander, who had it from Holbein's own circle of contemporaries,--that the painter's life was made wretched by her violent temper. We shall find him far from blameless in later years; but though it may not excuse him, his unhappy home must largely explain his alienation. Yet that it can explain such an alteration as that between the Louvre drawing and the Basel portrait I do not believe. Nor could I persuade myself either that any married woman of the sixteenth century wore her hair in that most exclusive and invariable of Teuton symbols--"maiden" plaits;--or that any husband ever thought it necessary to advertise upon a picture of his wife that he held her "in all honour." Myself, I must believe, then, that this portrait was made years before 1522; probably in the young painter's first months in Basel, in 1515; and thus some fourteen years before the Basel group of 1529 was painted. It may well have been that some serious misunderstanding between them was at the bottom of that otherwise inexplicable departure in 1517, and the two years' absence in Lucerne and still more southern cities. Of course this is mere guesswork; so is every hypothesis until it is proved. But all the simple commonplaces of first love, estrangement, separation, and a renewed betrothal after Elsbeth's early widowhood with one child, could easily have run a natural course between 1515 and their marriage, somewhere about 1520. As for the inscription,--it is a detail that Woltmann thinks represents a repetition of the one phrase, and that I imagine to have suggested what for some reason Holbein did not wish to proclaim:--"In all honour. [In all love.]" But nothing can shake my conviction that in it we hear the faint far-off echoes from some belfry in Holbein's own city of Is. The realities of that chime are buried,--whether well or ill,--four hundred years deep in the seas that roll over that submerged world of his youth and passion. But living emotion, we may be sure, went to the writing and the treasuring of this pledge to Elsbeth or himself; a pledge redeemed when she became his wife.