And now, after the event of the previous evening, he woke up with immense alarm and disgust. He could not avoid thinking of two things: first, that if any man had told him a month before that he would propose to Pani Elzen, he would have thought that man an idiot; second, that the charm of relations with her which lay in uncertainty, in unfinished words, in the mutual divining of glances and thoughts, in the deferred confessions and in mutual attractions, was greater than that which flowed from the present condition. For Svirski it had been more agreeable to prepare the engagement than to be engaged; now he was thinking that if in the same proportion it would be less agreeable to become a husband than to be an affianced, deuce take his fate. At moments the feeling that he was bound, that he had no escape, that, whether he wished or not, he must take Pani Elzen with Romulus and Remus into his life-boat seemed to him simply unendurable. Not wishing then as a man of honor to curse Pani Elzen, he cursed Romulus and Remus, with their lisping, their bird-like, narrow heads and bird-like skulls. "I have had my cares, but really I have been as free as a bird, and I could put my whole soul into my pictures," said he to himself; "now, Satan knows how it will be!" And the cares of an artist, which he felt at that moment, spoiled his good-humor, though they turned his thoughts in another direction. Pani Elzen and the whole marriage question receded into the second place; and into the first came his picture, "Sleep and Death," on which he had been working for a number of months, and to which he attributed immense importance. This picture was a protest against the accepted idea of death. Frequently, while talking with artists, Svirski had been indignant at Christianity because it had brought into life and art the representation of death as a skeleton. That seemed to him the greatest injustice. The Greeks had imagined Thanatos[14] as a winged genius; that was correct. What can be more disgusting and frightful than a skeleton? If death be represented in that way, it should not be by Christians, who conceive death as a return to new life. According to Svirski, the present idea was born in the gloomy German soul which created Gothic architecture,--solemn and majestic, but as gloomy as if the church were a passage, not to the glories of heaven, but to underground gulfs. Svirski had marvelled always that the Renaissance had not recreated the symbol of death. Indeed, if Death had not always been silent, and had desired to complain, it would have said, "Why do people depict me as a skeleton? A skeleton is just what I have no wish to be, and will not be!" In Svirski's picture the genius of Sleep was delivering, mildly and quietly, the body of a maiden to the genius of Death, who, bending down, extinguished in silence the flame of a lamp burning at her head. [14] Death.