It was without strings--an unborn music. Perhaps the Christian lady had declined to accept a pagan Muse for midwife, and had temporised with her would-be deliverer, hoping to convert him. If so, she had played her cards badly. I wondered if the man had been a fortune-hunter. But in that event Madame Sophia would certainly be Madame de Crespigny. Whatever the case, however, the picture made a deep impression on me, and from my first moment of seeing it I was haunted by the desire to become myself the subject of such a master’s devotion. _Ma vue et mes minauderies firent tout-à-coup tourner la girouette._ For the first time I felt myself a woman, encumbered with the heavy responsibilities of her sex. One day--it was some eighteen months later--returning from a commission to the convent, I walked straight into the presence of the original of the picture and its painter. Yes, that is the truth. He had run faith at last to earth, it seemed, and, armed with it, was returned to add the strings to the abortive harp, and perfect the ancient harmony. I could have thought that, to do so, he had need of faith indeed; until, looking at madam, I started in sheer wonder. She was transfigured--rejuvenated. The happiest light--bashful, coy, defiant, and surrendering its defiance--was in her eyes. She was more like a wife in the first wonder of motherhood than the starved _religieuse_ of yesterday. And the cause! Ah, my Alcide! The creature rose upon my entrance, and I could have laughed in the face of my own befooled ideal. I had thought of Raphael and the Fornarina; and, behold! a slack, half-drowned-looking figure, with an expression, and conduct of its limbs, as if it were just risen gasping from a pond--there he stood, no sort of natural fowl at all, but a freak of genius like a five-legged calf at a fair. “He! he!” giggled he, and held himself as if he were waiting to be told what to do next. He was tall, it is true; and there was a good deal of him, mostly gnarled bone, if that counted to his credit. His forehead, streaked with dark hair turning grey, was strong and ample, and in itself something of a feature; but, mercy! the loose indetermination of his lower lip, and the way it overhung, foolish and disproportionate as an elephant’s, the little folded chin! As I stared, too mortified for manners, he returned my gaze, suddenly startled, it seemed, into a speechlessness so stertorous that little Patty, who had entered with and stood behind me, fell back a step in confusion. “Ah!” he exclaimed at that, chuckling, “and is hee-ar the little girl I knew?” He spoke, when he did at last, drawlingly, and ended, as was his way, by wrinkling his thin hooked nose and hee-hawing a little laugh through it. “She is grown, is she not?” said madam, answering for Patty, to whom he had referred, though indeed his eyes were all the time on me. Her voice was so changed and soft, I hardly recognised it.