Fra Balthasar was a plump man and a comely, black of eye and full of lip. His shaven chin shone blue as sleek velvet. He had turned from the _Pietà_ towards the altar, where a triptych gleamed with massed and brilliant colour. The Virgin, a palpitating divinity breathing stars and gems from her full bosom, gazed with a face of sensuous serenity at the infant lying in her lap. She seemed to exhale an atmosphere of gold. On either wing, angels, transcendant girls in green and silver, purple and azure, scarlet and white, made the soul swim with visions of ruddy lips and milk-white hands. Their wings gleamed like opals. They looked too frail for angels, too human for heaven. The Lord of Avalon sat on his scarlet hassock, and stared at the Madonna with some measure of awe. She was no attenuated, angular, green-faced fragment of saintliness, but by every curve a woman, from plump finger to coral lip. "You are no Byzantine," quoth the man on the hassock, with something of a sigh. The priest glanced at him and smiled. There were curves in lip and nostril that were more than indicative of a sleek and sensuous worldliness. Fra Balthasar was much of an Antinous, and doted on the conviction. "I paint women, messire," he said. His lordship laughed. "Divinities?" Balthasar flourished his brush. "Divine creatures, golden flowers of the world. Give me the rose to crush against my mouth, violets to burn upon my bosom. Truth, sire, consider the sparkling roundness of a woman’s arm. Consider her wine-red lips, her sinful eyes, her lily fingers dropping spikenard into the soul. I confess, sire, that I am a man." The friar’s opulent extravagance of sentiment suited the litheness of his look. Balthasar had enthroned himself in his own imagination as a species of Apollo, a golden-tongued seer, whose soul soared into the glittering infinitudes of art. An immense egotist, he posed as a full-blooded divinity, palpitating to colour and to sound. He had as many moods as a vain woman, and was a mere fire-fly in the matter of honour. "Reverend sire," quoth the man on the footstool with some tightening of the upper lip, "you bulk too big for your frock, methinks." Balthasar touched a panel with his brush; cast a glance over his shoulder, with a cynical lifting of the nostril. "My frock serves me, sire, as well as a coat of mail." "And you believe the things you paint?" The man swept a vermilion streak from his brush. "An ingenuous question, messire." "I am ever ingenuous." "A perilous habit." "Yet you have not answered me." The friar tilted his chin like a woman eyeing herself in a mirror. "Religion is full of picturesque incidents," he said. "And is profitable."