Nor, in fact, could he have done it, for she stood before him with all the charms which are left to a Juno, when one takes from her the gracious hue of the first innocence, with her forest of plumage, which hundreds in Lower Scheerau wear after her, because they, as well as a few of my lady readers, who also _put on_ more feathers than they will _slit_ (pens) in their whole life, have made out so much as this, that every Juno must be a Goddess, and every Goddess a Juno, and that ladies'-heads and harpsichords must always be stuck or struck with _quills_.
She asked him after the name of his drawing-master (the Genius); his own she herself told him. She could not fail, with all her missteps, to command a certain respect, and her sins and the Devil seemed to walk behind her only as Chamber-Moors; her face, like her behavior, bore the inner consciousness of her remaining virtues and her talents. Nevertheless she remarked in the shy reverence which Gustavus manifested less for her rank and worth than for her sex, that he had little knowledge of the world. She avoided all circumlocution and made a direct application to him for a drawing of the whole park to send to her brother in Saxony. I call that a request, which she properly always framed in addressing men in the jocose tone of a cabinet-order--and one could oppose her female ukases in no other way than by masculine ones.
Let woman once lay a commission upon thee, then thou art hers, body and soul; all thy disagreeable steps, all thy irksome services in her behalf resolve themselves into charms around that image of her which thou hast spread out on the bony walls of thy brain. To rescue--avenge--teach--protect a woman is hardly much better (only a little) than to love her at once. Gustavus never heard a more welcome request; he sketched the park in a very short time, and could hardly wait for the forenoon in which he was at liberty to hand it to her. We all know what he hoped to behold in the Resident Lady's apartment beside herself--but all he found there beside her was the little pupil (Laura) of the absent Beata, at the Silvermann's-harpsichord.
The Resident Lady fixed a long look upon the drawing. "Have you," said she, "seen any pieces by our Court Painter? You should be his scholar and he yours--he has never yet painted a fine portrait nor a poor landscape--in your drawing the statues are finer than the garden--retain your fault, and continue to beautify persons," she said and looked upon him. In my slender artistic judgment--for they have never yet admitted one of all my pieces, as aspirant, into a picture-gallery, and I seek, with more honor, rather to review publicly such exhibitions than to enrich them--the precise opposite is true, and my hero (like his biographer) makes far better landscapes than portraits. "Try it," she continued, "with a living original"--he seemed perplexed as to the intention of her advice--"take one that will sit to you as long as the artist himself sits." Oefers vanity with Gustavus's impetuosity might, at this point, have got together a stupid piece of politeness--"Here! this one I mean in here "--and she pointed to a looking-glass; at this moment he was, after all, on the point of coming out with the resuscitated flattery, that her figure was beyond his pencil: when she luckily added: "Paint yourself and show me the picture." Over an accidentally swallowed _sottise_ one grows quite as red as over a rejected one--thou beautiful, burning red Gustavus!