ssionately yearned, did not, in spite of their daily intercourse,
ripen again into the old intimacy.

When, years before, they had become acquainted with one another in
Kiel, where Felix first began the study of the law, they had soon
become inseparable. The lonely artist stood in special need of a friend
with quick perceptions, who, in those early days when his talent was
cautiously working its way to the front, could fan his courage by
taking a lively interest in his work; and Felix soon saw enough of the
senseless and tasteless life led by his fellow-students to make him
long for other society. The hours that he stole from his beer-club and
his fencing-school, in order to work with Jansen at all sorts of noble
arts, sometimes making an attempt himself with a piece of clay, and
then again spending the evening in his friend's simple little room in
confidential talk over a very frugal supper and some modest wine, were
looked back upon as the happiest of his whole youth. Even then Jansen
struck people as a very original, reserved, strong, and forceful man,
who had no needs but those which he was able to supply by his own
unaided powers. It was known that he sprang from a peasant family,
that, impelled by accidental incentives only and without any
encouragement from teachers or patrons, he had made himself an artist
by the force of his iron will. How he also succeeded in attaining, in
other fields, such an education that it was not easy for any one to
detect the want of a regular course of schooling, was scarcely less
incomprehensible. Gradually his talent began to attract some attention,
and a few orders straggled in, which enabled him to earn a scanty
living. But as he scorned to let himself be lionized in society, to be
petted by ladies and engaged for aesthetic tea parties, the first
feeling of interest soon grew cold; and with a shrug of the shoulders
people left this eccentric individual, who placed himself in such sharp
antagonism to the modern tendency of art, to himself again, and to his
pictures of naked gods and his undisguised contempt for social
traditions.

It was thus that Felix found him then, and he found him but little
different now, after all these years of separation--averse to all
intercourse with men who did not stand in some relation or other to his
art, and inaccessible, so far as his inner life was concerned, even to
his few intimate acquaintances. But still the years had not passed
without leav