It might have been a flame topaz, with streaks of blood-red across it, trailing off into milky whiteness at the edges and emphasizing the clear honey colour of the transparent stone. In the middle of it, just where its lightning rays were most dazzling, was a tiny pearl, an islet, hardly larger than a freckle, but of a blue that put the sapphire into the shade, and.... Thus Wenk was thinking to himself, unable to keep his eyes from the jewel. “It is a trifle too big for my hand,” said the Count, answering his visitor’s unspoken thoughts, “but the stone is so ... how shall I describe its originality? Well, I can only say that it is like a recital by Endivian, whom you doubtless know, and it was he who gave it to me. He brought it back from Penderappimur.” “Is he the fashionable jeweller nowadays?” asked Wenk, who seemed somewhat at sea. “Herr von Wenk,” said the Countess gravely, “Endivian is the fashionable young Goethe of this season.” Then she laughed. “No! Endivian the poet received the jewel at the Court of Artimerxes II, instead of the goblet, from the poem of his spiritual father ... you know it, ‘Give me no golden chain’ ... and when he returned, he announced in Germany, much as the Pope announces the Golden Rose, that his greatest admirer should have it. The choice fell upon my husband. It would have been better if he had given it me.” “Why don’t you enthuse about him as I do?” asked the Count, with a pleasant smile, looking at her very tenderly as he spoke. “Peter Resch dedicated his rubbish to him, and that was enough for me,” was the Countess’s laughing retort. “Pooh, Peter Resch, indeed!” said the Count. “He is one of the Impressionists who has arrived. By the way, dearest, I have got something new.” “From the Jennifer gallery?” “Can one get a real picture anywhere else? There is nothing left.... And one has a clear and incontestable and direct impression. If the artistic temperament would only renounce colour ... it would be the beginning of really abstract thought, of the detachment from everything which needs the help of another consciousness to interpret its vision.” The Countess replied, with apparent earnestness: “Thank Heaven, we do get a little further. If in the realm of music, too, genius had any prospect of renouncing the crash of sound when it desires to express itself, the world would soon be attaining its aim.” The Count went on enthusiastically: “A sublime atmosphere of space ... in two blues ... which project into the cosmogony and play upon each other between storm and lightning.... “Whereupon the Almighty leaves His seat, dear Herr von Wenk, saying, ‘My creation has surpassed Me; I take My leave!’” The conversation continued in this tone for awhile, and an hour later Wenk took his leave. He felt depressed as he drove home, but he had hardly sat down to dinner when a note was brought him, and he read: DEAR HERR VON WENK,