uinted askance at her work ...

He stood beside her, his right hand on his hip, his left rapidly
twisting his brown moustache. His slanting eyebrows showed a gloomy and
strained agitation, while he softly whistled to himself, as usual. His
attire, most carefully selected and in excellent taste, was a suit of
quiet gray and of conservative cut. But in his work-lined brow, above
which his dark hair was so very simply and correctly parted, there was
a nervous quiver, and the features of his Southern countenance were
already sharply marked, as if a hard burin had gone over them and
brought them into higher relief, whereas his mouth seemed so soft in
outline, his chin so gently formed ... After a time he drew his hand
over brow and eyes and turned away.

"I ought not to have come," he said.

"Why not, Tonio Kroeger?"

"I have just got up from my work, Lisaveta, and the inside of my head
looks exactly like your canvas. A framework, a dim sketch soiled with
alterations, and a few dabs of color, to be sure; and now I come here
and see the same. And the conflict and contrast that tormented me at
home I find here too," and he sniffed the air. "It is strange. If an
idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you
will actually smell it in the wind. Fixative and the aroma of spring,
isn't that it? Art and--well, what is the other? Do not say 'Nature,'
Lisaveta, 'Nature' does not exhaust it. Oh, no, I think I ought rather
to have gone walking, although it is a question whether I should have
felt any better: five minutes ago, not far from here, I met a
colleague, Adalbert the novelist, and he said in his aggressive way,
'Damn the spring! It is and always will be the most horrible season.
Can you lay hold of one sensible idea, Kroeger, can you work out the
tiniest point or effect with any calmness, when you are feeling an
indecent prickling in your blood and are upset by a whole mass of
irrelevant sensations which so soon as you test them are unmasked as
unmistakably trivial and wholly unusable stuff? As for me, I am going
to the cafe now. That is neutral ground, untouched by the change of
seasons, you see; it represents, so to speak, the remote and elevated
sphere of the literary, where one is capable of none but distinguished
ideas ...' And he went to the cafe, and perhaps I ought to have gone
along."

Lisaveta was amused.

"That is good, Tonio Kroeger. That about 'indecent prickling' is good.
And in a w