And maybe it's not even Pan sitting on that stone: in spite of my careful and thorough studies, I have been unable to determine for sure — maybe it's Hermes my picture represents, which means not the son but the father, no small difference, that! for in that case it is not the son's lovemates whom we see, his frolicking maid-lovers depicted as the three nymphs, but the woman-mother herself: in an ambiguous way, every little motif in the picture refutes its own assertions, so much so that I could afford quietly to suppose — in fact, this supposition is what has excited me — that the painter deliberately did this brave mixing up, showing the father but meaning the son or, conversely, painting the son but meaning to show the father in his youth, and depicting for us the mother as the adoring lover of them both, for this figure in her olive-green cloak at the right side of the picture, with her head lowered, her sparkling eyes following her fingers gliding over the strings of the lyre pressed against her bosom, seems somewhat older, perhaps considerably older than the naked youth, and we must risk drawing this conclusion even if we shudder at the thought that our eyes, prompted by wishful imagination, may deceive us and even if we know well that gods are ageless; of course, when it comes to nymphs, this is not entirely accurate, for their immortality, as evidenced by traditional narratives that have come down to us, is directly proportional to their proximity to the divinities, and consequently there are mortals among them: nymphs of the sea are said to be immortal, like the sea itself, but the same cannot be said about the more common naiads of the springs, and even less so of the nymphs of the meadows, groves, and trees, especially those who live in oak trees and die when the trees die; and if, following the painter's rather confusing hints, we try to guess the age of a particular nymph by examining her face, as her fingers reach for the most distant string of the lyre, her glance measuring the exact intervals between the strings, for she wants to produce an elegant light glissando, we must remind ourselves of the ancient method of reckoning life spans according to which the chattering crow lives the equivalent of nine human generations, a stag has as many as four crows' lives, and three stags' lives add up to a raven's age; a palm tree lives as long as nine ravens, and nymphs, Zeus' lovely-haired daughters, can expect to live as many years as make up the lives of ten palm trees; in this calculation, then, our nymph must have been into her sixth raven's lifetime, so by declaring her older than the naked youth I don't mean to measure her age in human years, and I did not see the tiniest wrinkle on her face — she appeared to be blessed with the wisdom of motherhood, at least when compared to the two other nymphs, who, although closer to the youth, in fact identical to him in age, were untouched by that bliss beyond pain; and I could not exactly tell you why, but her neck also indicated this maternal wisdom, arching out of the rich folds of the cloak draped over her shoulders; oh, that exquisite feminine neckline! which remained bare and white under auburn hair gathered into a loose bun by a silver clasp and seeming so attractively and shamelessly naked precisely because of a few unruly curls, short, frizzy strands falling back onto the flesh — of course this is most attractive, for it is the mix of being dressed and being naked that we like so much; and if I succeeded in describing the nymph's neck in some such fashion, I'd most likely put into words the experience I've preserved in the image of my betrothed's neck, no, not just preserved, but cherished, adoringly, an experience of the two of us sitting next to each other while leafing through a photo album, let's say: she would lean forward a little, to look at some negligible detail in a picture, and I'd gaze at her from the side, quite close, wanting to bend over her, touch her neck with my lips, with tiny kisses barely graze the skin made taut by her movement, dissolve her warmth and smell in my mouth, work my way up to her hair — but I don't, I am held back by a sense of propriety, tact.