Christine de Ruyter had taken lessons of the best masters in Holland, Italy, and France. Few, if any women artists of her age, equalled or excelled her. Her conversations on art in the Netherlands charmed her two artist friends. She said, "The works of art of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands seemed to grow out of the very soil of the low countries. Our old artists revelled in the varied costumes and manifold types that thronged the cities of the Hanseatic League. The artist's imagination was fascinated by the wealth of color he saw on sturdy laborers, on weather-beaten mariners, burly citizens, and sagacious traders. "Rubens delighted often in a concentrated light, and was master of artistic material along the whole range. He painted well portraits, landscapes, battles of heroes, gallant love-making of the noble, and the coarse pleasures of the vulgar. Nearly a thousand pictures bear the name of Rubens. "The artistic labor of Frans Hals of Haarlem extended over half a century. He possessed the utmost vivacity of conception, purity of color, and breadth of execution, as shown in his latest works, and so well did he handle his brush that drawing seems almost lost in a maze of color tone. The throng of genre painters, who have secured for Dutch art its greatest triumph, are well nigh innumerable." Christine was very fond of flower-pieces, and had painted lovely marguerites on Gertrude's white dress, in Alfonso's full length picture of his sister, which he was soon to carry to Paris as his wedding present. Leo and Alfonso much wished to extend their journey north to Copenhagen and Stockholm, the "Venice of the North," but letters urging a speedy return to the marriage of George and Gertrude in Paris, forced the two artists to shorten their journey, say good-bye to their kind friends of Amsterdam, and hasten back to Paris, taking portraits of their own skill as wedding gifts. CHAPTER XIX PARIS AND THE WEDDING Friday morning, Alfonso and Leo were missed at the table, and during the day as guides. Early every day while in Paris, Alfonso had bouquets of fresh flowers sent to the rooms of his mother, sisters, and May Ingram. After his departure the flowers did not come, so Gertrude and May before breakfast walked down the boulevard to the flower show, near the Madeleine, where twice a week are gathered many flower carts in charge of courteous peasant women. The flowers of Paris are usually cheap. A franc, eighteen cents, buys a bunch of pansies, or roses in bud or full bloom, or marguerites. The latter are similar to the English ox-eyed daisy, a favorite flower with the French, also with Gertrude, who often pinned a bunch on May Ingram. In mid-winter Parisian gardeners delight in forcing thousands of white lilac blossoms, which are sold in European capitals for holiday gifts.