"You have both come into the world too late, you are both wandering anachronisms, as he says of himself alone in his letter. His energy and your artistic nature to-day no longer find the soil and air that are good for them, and that they deserve. When I look about me, dearest, I say to myself: 'Where are now the people, the prince, the century to appreciate this power, to lay commissions, reward, honor, and admiration at the feet of this creative spirit? to post sonnets on the door of his workshop, to make a passage for him when he strides among the multitude, as we read that the ancients did, and the great men, under the rule of the famous popes and the pomp-loving princes?'--Oh! my dearest friend, I could weep tears of blood when I think how, instead of all this, you live here, appreciated only by a circle of good friends and enthusiastic disciples, and are made the butt of stupid malice or blind ignorance in all the newspapers! And then, when a demand arises for the production of some work to adorn a square or a building, wretched quacks, who are not worthy to unloose the latchet of your shoes, come running up by all sorts of back-stairs and secret ways, and steal the prize away from you, and you remain hidden in the dark! Now, don't shake your head! I know how you think about the applause of the masses, and how little you begrudge it to the poor wretches who hear no divine voice within them. But be honest now--if this monument"--she mentioned the name of a man to whom a statue had just been erected, on which occasion Jansen's application had, as usual, been rejected--"if this commission had fallen to you--and then another had followed close upon that--how differently you would stand in your own esteem when you had become a central figure of your time! To say nothing of the fact that then you would be able to close the factory, as you call it, next door, and would have no need to strike a blow of the mallet that did not come straight from the heart!"
She had talked herself into a state of great excitement; and now, when he looked up at her, the shining brightness of her look and the soft glow of her cheeks enraptured him. But he controlled himself and remained seated.