ld Hans. I am going to stay
here with you, if you have nothing against it, in your most intimate
daily companionship; and, if some day you strike your tent and wander
away somewhere else, I will go too. In one word, I have put my whole
past career behind me, and broken up all my old associations, so that I
may begin, as I said, my whole life over again, and not be anything but
what I care most to be--a free man; not make myself anything but what I
have always secretly longed to be, an artist, as good or as bad a one
as mother Nature will let me."

He poured forth these words hurriedly, and with downcast face, and as
he talked drew a light circle in the nearest flower-bed with his cane.
It was only after a pause, and when his friend made no reply, that he
raised his eyes and met, with some embarrassment, the quiet gaze fixed
upon him.

"You don't seem quite able to accept this change in my life all at
once, Hans? Others besides you have had the same feeling--the person
most concerned in it, for instance. That I have become a conceited ass,
and fancy that because I used to be extravagantly fond of modeling all
manner of absurdities in clay, and cutting caricatures of my friends in
meerschaum--this I hope you will not believe. But why I can't get
beyond the condition of a dilettante, if I only am serious about it,
and think of and do nothing else but study my A, B, C, under a good
master--I beg of you, my dear Daedalus, don't pull such a disheartening
face! Don't look so sadly at the lost youth--as I probably seem to you;
or at least smile ironically, so as to rouse my anger and wound my
_amour propre_ a little! But by the eternal gods--what is there after
all so horribly fatal in this decision? That it hasn't occurred to me
till after twenty-seven years? That is bad, I admit, but not a proof
that it is hopeless. Think of your own half-countryman, Asmus Carstens,
or of--well, I won't give you a whole chapter of artists' biographies.
And besides, when I am altogether independent and have burnt my ships
behind me--"

He stopped again. His friend's silence seemed to check his utterance.
For a time nothing was to be heard around them but the splashing of the
little fountain, and from the window above them the notes of the
battle-painter's flute, every little while dying dismally away.

Suddenly the sculptor stood still.

"And does your fiancee agree to this project?"

"My fiancee? What in the world puts that question in