He had been swimming all his life in salt sea-fed rapids; this sluggish, dull, canal water, mirroring between its rushes a life that had scarcely changed for centuries, had a charm for him.
He stayed awhile in Antwerpen.

The town is ugly and beautiful; it is like a dull quaint gres de Flandre jug, that has precious stones set inside its rim.

It is a burgher ledger of bales and barrels, of sale and barter, of loss and gain; but in the heart of it there are illuminated leaves of missal vellum, all gold and color, and monkish story and heroic ballad, that could only have been executed in the days when Art was a religion.
He gazed himself into an homage of Rubens, whom before he had slighted, never having known (for, unless you have seen Antwerp, it is as absurd to say that you have seen Rubens, as it is to think that you have seen Murillo out of Seville, or Raffaelle out of Rome); and he studied the Gretchen carefully, delicately, sympathetically, for he loved Scheffer; but though he tried, he failed to care for her.
"She is only a peasant; she is not a poem," he said to himself; "I will paint a Gretchen for the Salon of next year." But it was hard for him to portray a Gretchen.

All his pictures were Phryne,--Phryne in triumph, in ruin, in a palace, in a poor-house, on a bed of roses, on a hospital mattress; Phryne laughing with a belt of jewels about her supple waist; Phryne lying with the stones of the dead-house under her naked limbs,--but always Phryne.

Phryne, who living had death in her smile; Phryne, who lifeless had blank despair on her face; Phryne, a thing that lived furiously every second of her days, but Phryne a thing that once being dead was carrion that never could live again.
Phryne has many painters in this school, as many as Catherine and Cecilia had in the schools of the Renaissance, and he was chief amidst them.
How could he paint Gretchen if the pure Scheffer missed?
Not even if, like the artist monks of old, he steeped his brushes all Lent through in holy water.
And in holy water he did not believe.
One evening, having left Antwerpen ringing its innumerable bells over the grave of its dead Art, he leaned out of the casement of an absent friend's old palace in the Brabant street that is named after Mary of Burgundy; an old casement crusted with quaint carvings, and gilded round in Spanish fashion, with many gargoyles and griffins, and illegible scutcheons.
Leaning there, wondering with himself whether he would wait awhile and paint quietly in this dim street, haunted with the shades of Memling and Maes, and Otto Veneris and Philip de Champagne, or whether he would go into the East and seek new types, and lie under the red Egyptian heavens and create a true Cleopatra, which no man has ever done yet,--young Cleopatra, ankle-deep in roses and fresh from Caesar's kisses,--leaning there, he saw a little peasant go by below, with two little white feet in two wooden shoes, and a face that had the pure and simple radiance of a flower.
"There is my Gretchen," he thought to himself, and went down and followed her into the cathedral.