Yet why should he grieve so passionately for Photini? No affair of his if she courted slander and irreverent familiarity; nor yet if she indulged in inadmissible tastes in public, and wounded and insulted all who came near her. His own birth and its responsibilities surely excluded him from such preoccupations, and his natural fastidiousness made relations, however slight and flexible, with a woman like Photini impossible. This he knew well, and despite the knowledge felt miserably sad and unquiet. He wanted so much that she should not degrade his high ideal of the artist who has received nature’s patent of nobility, and a lonely impressionable boy like Rudolph could not afford to stand by tamely and watch the dethroning of his idol. For Photini had been his idol long before they had met. Her name had been borne into his retreat from many quarters, and no one had hinted to him her unlovableness--her disreputableness. Liszt had only spoken to him of her genius with enthusiasm. Had his small circle deliberately conspired to keep him in ignorance of this cruel reality, while he was wandering and losing himself in a forest of delicate and poetic illusions?--building hope upon hope of an unanalysable nature until his whole happiness grew to bind itself round the thought of this unknown woman crowned by art with a glory greater than her womanhood? Photini Natzelhuber! His mother had often told him of the time she first came to Vienna, a slip of a girl, with a curly boyish head and the strangest topaz eyes. Mossy dark hair and topaz eyes with divine fingers--what more did it require to set aflame a dreamy imaginative lad? And when strangers visited the Castle at Rapolden Kirchen and spoke of her, he never seemed to understand that years had flown and left her less girlish, but pictured her like Art, like a goddess ever young. And when he read of knightly reverence and allegiance, he told himself that one day he should go abroad and seek Photini. He dreamed of no conditions or reward, not of marriage or of love in the ordinary sense. To wear her colours, serve her in true devotion, honour her above all women, and humbly sue the privilege to obey her commands and caprices with some considerable recreative pauses for music--this was Rudolph’s innocent dream. Remember he was brought up by a high-bred mother, all grace and gentle benignity, a woman who wore her widowhood like a sovereign lady to whom man’s homage was a sweet claim. And her pretty and impracticable theories but helped to feed the fires of a fatally romantic temperament, while his complete and unboylike isolation left him an easy prey to the riotous play of fancy. Then is it any wonder that reality at the outset should both crush and bewilder him?