"Now, place yourself here!" she cried, when the figure was entirely exposed. "To be sure she is divine seen from any side, but viewed in half-profile--taking in just a little of the back and the outline standing out so clearly against the bright sky--is it not ravishing? Does not one feel as if it were just going to spring from its pedestal and rush through the room, dragging one with it in its mad whirl? I can never look at this work without my old love for dancing coming back to me in my old age, and vibrating through every limb! It is a pity that I am such an ungraceful person, otherwise you would have to tuck up your dress and dance a reel with me." And she did indeed make a few very lively movements, which were grotesque enough. "I entreat you, Angelica, be sensible! You are, to be sure, thoroughly at home here. But it takes away my breath! Everything is so strange to me--" "Isn't it so--one doesn't see anything of this sort every day? How every part lives and breathes! One might actually believe that the blooming young flesh must yield when one touches it; and, with all that, so pure and magnificent and full of style, that one never thinks of the model when looking at it." "Is it modeled after life?" "Do you think that this kind of thing is imagined out of thin air?" "And girls can actually be found who allow themselves to be made use of for--" "More than enough, you darling innocent. To be sure--of a sort that one of us would not touch with gloves. But Rosenbusch says that, for all that, they are better than their reputation. He has found very respectable creatures among them--one, indeed, who had a regular husband and a number of children, and who went to the studios as soberly as others go to the seamstress or the milliner. Yes, yes, my dearest, we good children of good families have no conception of all this. Look," she continued, turning to Felix's modeling-board, "there is where the young baron works. He has copied the foot of the anatomical model, and now, as a reward, he is permitted to recruit himself over the foot of an Æginite. Not bad!--by no means without talent! An uncommonly handsome and agreeable man, too, whom I like very much. But--remember what I tell you--he will always remain a cavalier, and will never in all his life become a true artist!" She accented the word "cavalier," in the contemptuous manner in which a sailor talks about a landsman. Then she stepped up to the large central group of the Adam and Eve, and began cautiously to undo the covering.