Pilar had a drawing-block and used a pencil, Wilhelm sketched his
picture on a page of a large album in colored chalks like a pastel.
She kept trying to peep at his work, but he would not allow it, and
insisted on their making a compact not to look at one another's work
of art till it was finished. Two sittings sufficed, however, and the
portraits could be exchanged. Pilar gave a cry of surprise when
Wilhelm handed her his picture.
"How strange that we should have had almost the same idea."
She was represented as a Sphinx, after the Greek rather than the
Egyptian conception. A voluptuous, soft, round, feline body,
graceful, cruel paws, a wonderful bosom as if hewn out of marble,
and above it all Pilar's regally poised head with its crown of
shimmering gold hair, shrewd eyes, and blood-red vampire lips.
Between her forepaws she held a little trembling mouse in which
Wilhelm's features were cleverly indicated, and she looked down upon
her victim with a smile in which there was something of a foretaste
of the joy of tearing a quivering creature to pieces and sucking its
warm blood.
Pilar's drawing was a very good likeness of Wilhelm as Apollo in
Olympian nudity, handsome, slender and vapid, in its resemblance to
school copies of the antique.
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