Page:Auerbach-Spinozanovel.djvu/210

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188
SPINOZA.

his house. He often encountered her afterwards, and exchanged a few words with her; but otherwise troubled himself but little about her. He might have said with Job xxxi. I, "I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?" But now the time was come when he must think upon a maid, and hang with fascinated attention on her every word. The physician had gone on a journey, and had resigned his lessons to his daughter; Baruch too was her pupil.

Like her namesake Olympia Morata of Ferrara, whose Greek and Latin verse, in the last century, had been the wonder of her contemporaries, Olympia van den Ende was quite at home in the world of classics, but inclined more to scientific investigation, so that she might easily have aspired to be crowned with the hood of a doctor of philosophy; but she knew too well that the black velvet cap with its edging of Brussels point lace suited her blonde locks and white skin much better than the pointed red velvet hood of a doctor. Cicero's own daughter Julia did not answer the letters of her eloquent father in more elegant Latin than the daughter of the Amsterdam physician. Her white hands often bore traces of learned ink, for she exercised a rigorous censorship over her pupil's modes of expression, if they would not have been accepted in a Roman citizen; her smooth white brow gathered into folds when a barbarism came under her notice;