studio. Don't let yourself be alarmed by these two malicious gentlemen
with the idea that I shall try to capture you for a sitter. I must
paint your portrait some time, of course--it is a fate you cannot
escape; but my brush is by no means so presumptuous as these wicked men
will try to represent it. When you are a little more at home among us,
perhaps; but now--good-by!"

She nodded to the others, and disappeared into a side hall, into which
Rosenbusch also retreated, after a short stay among the old German
masters.

"We don't enforce this separation very rigidly, of course," said
Jansen, smiling. "But we have found out that when we all go together we
cannot bring ourselves into a really proper mood for study; we neither
learn nor enjoy. At best, we only get into a discussion of technical
points--problems of color and secrets of the palette, which are
especially unimportant to me, as I make no use of that kind of thing."

"But why do not you prefer to hold your Sunday solemnities before the
Medusa or the Barberini Faun?" said Felix.

"Because I know the Glyptothek by heart. And besides, I do not believe
that what we ought to look at in the works of the great masters is the
purely artistic side, if we want to profit by their study. Every one
who has passed his apprenticeship has his own ideas and prejudices and
obstinacies on those points. What we ought to get from them are
characteristics; force, refinement, and contempt for small means used
to small ends. But these I can learn just as well from a symphony of
Beethoven as from a noble building--from a gallery of paintings as from
a tragedy of Shakespeare; and then next day I can turn them to account
in my own work. And it is just these things that Rubens gives me better
than any other here--Rubens, whose works fill this whole room. As soon
as I come near him, he makes me forget all the photographic pettiness,
the fashionable rubbish and 'art-association' absurdities of our own
day."

"Tell me yourself," he continued, pointing to the walls of the Rubens
room, "do not you too feel as though you were in your tropical
wildernesses again, where Nature hardly knows how to restrain her
overflowing vigor, and where all that moves or grows seems fairly
intoxicated with its own abounding strength? Here, no one dreams that
there is an everyday, prosaic life outside, that presses all created
things into its service--men serving the State, women mere family
beasts of burden,