They become a household, rubbing along together well enough. The Master moody, but not cruel; Margarethe willing enough to seem servile when it serves her purposes, and having a safe place and house to keep serves her purposes very well indeed. The girls are, if not happy, at least comfortable, and Iris is awakening to curiousity about the real world around her.
Then comes the day when Iris, more aware than her mother that much of the Master's interest in their family lies in drawing her, plain though she is, has been sent to fetch Ruth from the meadow where they went the first day they met the Master. Once there, a fancy seizes her, to become a monstrousity of sorts to startle, and perhaps amuse, the painter.
So, with a rack of branches, some sacking, and a stolen-in-passing fingerful of dun paint for Ruth's face, the two become a mythic creature, The Girl-Stag of the Meadows. Ruth lowing like a cow, the two caper in under the startled eyes of not one but two men, one of them a stranger, leaving both girls deeply embarassed in their different ways. "I was expecting the brilliant daughters of my housekeeper," says the Master. "Instead, let me introduce some beast of the forest."
But he cannot keept up the dry tone, and, rebuking them for worrying their mother, who has gone to look for them, he directs them in to their supper. Not without, however, introducing his assistant, Caspar, newly return from the Hague. Caspar's reaction to the Girl-Stag is, "What fun to have a companion here!" The Master may be able to keep a straight face, but it plain he glad to see his apprentice.
When Caspar teases Iris as she leaves for the kitchen, "Girl or Stag?" she is pleased rather than offended, although she scarely knows why. She does not answer, although she cannot help a chortle. Already Iris knows that, plain though she is, light-hearted Caspar intends a joke, not an insult.
(to be continued)
The detail is from the painting, "The Chess Players," by Cornelius de Man.