Theodore Winthrop

“ How can you learn to trust women while you allow yourself daily to listen, and only carelessly to protest, when Densdeth urges his doctrine, that women and men only wait opportunity to be base?”
In fact, in violation of an instinct, I was going through the process of resolving to love Emma Denman, because I distrusted her, and such vague distrust seemed an unchivalric disloyalty, a cruel wrong to a friend.
The strange coincidence of Dreeme’s warning determined me to banish my superstitions. No more of this weakness! ”

“ In my laboratory, at my task of splitting atoms and unbraiding gases, I learnt from the exquisite order and proportion that Nature never forgets in her combinations to require the same of men. I found it in Dreeme. His genius in art was not of the ill-regulated, splashy, blotchy, boisterous class. ”

“ Strangely enough, — and here I recognized either a wound in Dreeme’s life or a want in his character, — there was not one scene of love — that is, the love Cupid manages — in the collection. Not one scene where lovers, happy or hapless, figured. No pretty picture of consent and fondness. Not one of passion and fervor.
Now, a young man or a young maiden, in the early twenties, in whose mind love is not the primal thought, is a monstrosity, and must be studied and analyzed with a view to cure. ”

“ I had sometimes had a painful lurking consciousness that if I were nobler than I was, — if my mind were more resolutely made up and unwavering on the side of virtue, — I should have applied the test of a higher and purer nature on my side to Emma Denman, and found her in some way fatally wanting. But whenever this injurious fancy stirred within me, I quelled it, saying, “If I were nobler, I should not have morbid notions about others. ”

“ An artist’s brain receives and stores images often without distinct volition. But you may lend my villain a likeness from your own memory.”
“Yes; our talk about Densdeth, and your warnings against an exaggerated danger are fresh in my mind. Certainly, as I see the face, it is Densdeth’s very self.”
“Now,” said Dreeme, “take your choice of my three sketches. Three simple stories, — which will you have? I painted them for your selection, and have taken much grateful pleasure in the work. One is for you, one for Locksley, one for myself, — a souvenir for each of us in happier days.” ”

“ A chaster feeling had presided over the studies of this fine genius. There was a severe simplicity in his drawings of women. He seemed to have approached the purer sex with a loving reverence, never with that coarse freedom which debases the work of many able men, nullifying all spiritual beauty One would say that the artist of these drawings had taken his mother and his sisters as models for the elevated and saintly beings, whom he had placed in scenes of calm beauty, and engaged in tender offices of mercy, pity, and pardon. ”

“ Within, myself — costume, purple velvet, lace, and rapier — and Locksley, in blouse and sabots, were bearing off a fainted lady, dark-haired, and robed in yellow.
“Twice immortal!” said I. “But why avert the heroine’s face?”
“Good female models are hard to find. My heroine should be worthy of my hero. Have you one of your own, whose features I might insert?”
“Have I found my heroine? Not yet, — that is, not certainly.”
Dreeme handed me the third picture. “My Incognita,” said he, “is willing to encounter bad company out of gratitude to her benefactors. ”