ntella, broke
off, and letting his eyes rest on the painter, began playing Schumann's
Kinderscenen. Harz leaped to his feet.

"Stop that!" he cried.

"It pricks you?" said Sarelli suavely; "what do you think of this?" he
played again, crouching over the piano, and making the notes sound like
the crying of a wounded animal.

"For me!" he said, swinging round, and rising.

"Your health! And so you don't believe in suicide, but in murder? The
custom is the other way; but you don't believe in customs? Customs
are only for Society?" He drank a glass of kummel. "You do not love
Society?"

Harz looked at him intently; he did not want to quarrel.

"I am not too fond of other people's thoughts," he said at last; "I
prefer to think my own.

"And is Society never right? That poor Society!"

"Society! What is Society--a few men in good coats? What has it done for
me?"

Sarelli bit the end off a cigar.

"Ah!" he said; "now we are coming to it. It is good to be an artist, a
fine bantam of an artist; where other men have their dis-ci-pline, he
has his, what shall we say--his mound of roses?"

The painter started to his feet.

"Yes," said Sarelli, with a hiccough, "you are a fine fellow!"

"And you are drunk!" cried Harz.

"A little drunk--not much, not enough to matter!"

Harz broke into laughter. It was crazy to stay there listening to this
mad fellow. What had brought him in? He moved towards the door.

"Ah!" said Sarelli, "but it is no good going to bed--let us talk. I have
a lot to say--it is pleasant to talk to anarchists at times."

Full daylight was already coming through the chinks of the shutters.

"You are all anarchists, you painters, you writing fellows. You live by
playing ball with facts. Images--nothing solid--hein? You're all for new
things too, to tickle your nerves. No discipline! True anarchists, every
one of you!"

Harz poured out another glass of wine and drank it off. The man's
feverish excitement was catching.

"Only fools," he replied, "take things for granted. As for discipline,
what do you aristocrats, or bourgeois know of discipline? Have you ever
been hungry? Have you ever had your soul down on its back?"

"Soul on its back? That is good!"

"A man's no use," cried Harz, "if he's always thinking of what others
think; he must stand on his own legs."

"He must not then consider other people?"

"Not from cowardice anyway."

Sarelli drank.

"What would you do," he said, strikin