t good works can only originate under the
pressure of an evil life, that he who, lives does not work, and that
one must have died in order to be altogether a creator.

IV

"Do I disturb you?" asked Tonio Kroeger on the threshold of the studio.
He was holding his hat in his hand, and even bowed slightly, although
Lisaveta Ivanovna was his close friend, whom he told everything.

"Take pity on me, Tonio Kroeger, and come in without ceremony," she
replied with her frisking intonation. "It is no secret that you have
enjoyed a good bringing up and know what is proper." Whereat she thrust
her brush into her left hand beside the palette, extended her right to
him, and looked into his face with a laugh and a shake of the head.

"Yes, but you are working," he said. "Let me see ... Oh, you have made
progress." And he surveyed in turn the colored sketches leaning against
chairs on either side of the easel, and the great canvas covered with a
network of squares, on which the first spots of color were beginning to
appear in the confused and shadowy charcoal sketch.

It was in Munich, in a rear building on Schelling Street, up several
nights of stairs. Outside, behind the broad north window, there was the
blue of the sky, the twitter of birds, and sunshine; and the young,
sweet breath of spring streaming in through an open trap-door mingled
with the odor of fixative and oil-paint that filled the large
work-room. Unobstructed, the golden light of the bright afternoon
flooded the spacious bareness of the studio, shone frankly on the
somewhat damaged floor, the rude table under the window covered with
bottles, tubes, and brushes, and the unframed studies on the unpapered
walls; shone on the screen of tattered silk which stood near the door
and shut off a small corner, tastefully furnished as a living-room and
rest-room, shone also on the nascent work on the easel and the painter
and the poet before it.

She might have been about as old as he, that is, a little past thirty.
She sat on a low foot-stool in a dark-blue paint-spotted apron-dress,
resting her chin on her hand. Her brown hair, tightly combed and
already turning gray on either side, covered her temples in soft waves
and supplied the frame for her dark Slavic face, infinitely appealing
in its expression, with a pug-nose, sharply prominent cheek bones, and
small, glittering black eyes. Expectant, distrustful, and as it were
irritated, she sq