It was a sketch merely, all except the head of the figure, in neutral first tints; and there was certainly no mistaking the subject. A man’s figure in imperial robes, leaning eagerly forward, stretching out his hands; his eyes fixed, his lips parted towards the sun, which suddenly bursts with a flood of light into the room, and illumines the desk and tablets, on which he had been inscribing his great _Hymn_. One could just catch this meaning; and the head of Julian the Apostate, which was boldly finished and beautiful, was a likeness of Jerome. ‘H’m!’ observed Falkenberg. ‘The Apostate—a curious idea.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I suppose that _is_ all?’ ‘All, except the studies I am doing with Herr Wilhelmi,’ she said, feeling all the pretty conceits with which she had tried to gloss over her work, small in amount, poor in execution, of the last three months, swept away, as cobwebs might be swept from a roof, till not a trace remained. ‘And has the Herr Professor praised your performances of late?’ ‘He has not—he has blamed them,’ said she, her cheek burning, but firmly resolved to confess the worst—to conceal nothing. ‘It would have been odd indeed if he had done so. Has he seen this last one that I have just been looking at?’ ‘No one has seen it but yourself,’ she replied, almost inaudibly. ‘It is not quite so bad as the other two. The head shows some signs of good workmanship, but the whole thing is poor and meretricious; and you know it is. Those other two studies, or attempts at studies, show a distinct and visible falling off. They are not so good by a long way as the little sketch you showed me at Trockenau. They are careless, sketchy, weak, and horribly amateurish. They are second-rate in every way—fit for magazine woodcuts—but as works of art! They are dreadful, and quite destitute of workmanship, and I am very sorry to see them.’ ‘Oh, Herr Falkenberg!’ she exclaimed, aghast. ‘You—but I deserve it. They are all that you say.’ She spoke with a proud humility, but her voice was stifled with suppressed sobs. His relentless words had aroused, as if by magic, the old spirit of eager ambition which, until a few months ago, had animated her. It was as if some one roughly shook her from some pleasant drowsy dream back into reality. In her own mind she had tried—not very successfully, it is true, but still with the effect of lulling herself into contentment—to call those inadequate attempts at pictures ‘vague fancies,’ ‘thoughts too subtle at once to take shape.’ Consummate criticism, neutral, calm and unimpassioned, fixed its piercing eyes upon them, and instantly pronounced them—daubs.