As if half speaking to herself, Christine repeated the words, "'Painted by one having never felt, or unable to feel, the emotions presented, and therefore one who cannot portray them.' That is just the trouble. I tried to speak in a language I do not know. Susie, I believe I am about half ice. Sometimes I think I am like Undine, and have no soul. I know I have no heart, in the sense that you have." "I live a very cold sort of life," she continued, with a slight shudder. "I seem surrounded by invisible barriers that I cannot pass. I can see, beyond, what I want, but cannot reach it. Oh, Susie, if you knew what I suffered when so ill! Everything seemed slipping from me. And yet why I should so wish to live I hardly know, when my life is so narrowed down." "You see the disease, but not the remedy," sighed Susie. "What is the remedy?" "_Love_. Love to God, and I may add love for some good man." Christine stopped a moment and almost stamped her foot impatiently. "You discourage me more than any one else," she cried. "As to loving God, how can I love merely a name? and, even if He existed, how could I love a Being who left His world so full of vile evils? As to human love, faugh! I have had enough of romantic attachments." "Do you never intend to marry?" "Susie, you are the friend of my soul, and I trust you and you only with our secret. Yes, I expect to marry, but not in this land. You know that in Germany my father will eventually be a noble, the representative of one of the most ancient and honorable families. We shall soon have sufficient wealth to resume our true position there. A husband will then be found for me. I only stipulate that he shall be able to give me position among the first, and gratify my bent for art to the utmost." "Well, Christine, you are a strange girl, and your dream of the future is stranger still." "Sometimes I think that all is a dream, and may end like one. Nothing seems certain or real, or turns out as one expects. Think of it. A nobody who swept my father's store the other day has this morning made such havoc in my dream that I am sick at heart." "But you cannot blame Mr. Fleet. He did it unconsciously; he was goaded on to do it. No _man_ could have done otherwise. You surely do not feel hardly toward him?" "We do not naturally love the lips and bless the voice that tell us of an incurable disease. Oh, no," she added, "why should I think of him at all? He merely happened to point out what I half suspected myself. And yet the peculiar way this stranger crosses my path from time to time almost makes me superstitious." "And you seem to have peculiar power over him. He would have assuredly left us in the lurch at our tableau party had it not been for you, and I should not have blamed him. And to-day he seemed troubled and pained beyond expression when he read from your face, as I imagine, that you were the author of the picture."