"What you say is all very wise and true," he said. "But for all that you don't quite hit the sore spot. I have known all this ever since my eyes were first opened to what went on around me, to what some people produce and other people admire. Yet in spite of that I have become what I am, and what I could no more have helped becoming than I could have helped coming into the world. Remember, too, how much better off I am than our friend Felix. As far as the outside world goes, we are both hampered and confined. The age has as little appreciation of high art as of the great personal activity toward which all his powers and wishes urge him. But I can at least put before myself and a half dozen true friends what there is in me, even if it has no fuller life than this; while our friend's special strengths can only reveal themselves in putting him at odds with everybody.
"And, when I look about me here, will not all these dumb creatures of mine continue to be my companions through life? I sometimes seem to myself like a father who has a number of daughters, all of them well brought up and each dear to his heart; and yet, loath as he is to lose any one of them out of his sight, it seems harder and harder to him, as the years go by, that no one of them finds a husband, and they all remain under his roof unprovided for. However, that is fate, and one learns to accept whatsoever the irresponsible powers bestow upon us. But that which comes from mortals--"
He suddenly sprang up, ran his hand through his hair, and stepped so close to his sweetheart, that Julie, little as she feared him even in his anger, involuntarily retreated a step.
"Felix was right," he said, in a hollow voice. "There is only one way of escape. These chains or others--we can never be free except on the other side of the ocean. Julie, if you could only make up your mind, if you feel as terribly in earnest as I do for our happiness--"
"My friend," she interrupted him, "I know what you would say. But the more earnestly I long for your--_our_ happiness--the more must I insist upon our striving to attain it in a perfectly prosaic and sober way. Your friend is a born adventurer, a circumnavigator--a world conqueror. Your world and mine is this studio. Can we take it with us in the ship? And do you think a finer sense of art is to be found among the Yankees or the red-skins than among our countrymen? No, my dearest Jansen, I think that with courage and good sense we shall be able to free ourselves even on this side of the water. You men are masters in despairing, we women in hoping. And, besides, the end of our year of probation is still far enough off."