The sculptor suddenly rose. "You find me as you left me," he said, his face darkening quickly; "what is past, let us let it rest. Come out of the arbor; it is suffocatingly hot under those thick vines." He went toward the little fountain, held his hands under the slender stream, and passed them over his brow. Then, for the first time, he turned to Felix again. His face was once more composed and bright. "And now tell me what has brought you here, and how long you are going to stay with me." "As long as you will have me--for ever and ever--_in infinitum_ if you will!" "You are joking. Don't do that, my dear boy. I am so utterly alone here, in spite of a plenty of good comrades with whom I can share everything except my most intimate thoughts, that the thought of beginning our old life again seems far too happy to me to be only made a jest of." "But it is my most serious earnest, dear old Hans. I am going to stay here with you, if you have nothing against it, in your most intimate daily companionship; and, if some day you strike your tent and wander away somewhere else, I will go too. In one word, I have put my whole past career behind me, and broken up all my old associations, so that I may begin, as I said, my whole life over again, and not be anything but what I care most to be--a free man; not make myself anything but what I have always secretly longed to be, an artist, as good or as bad a one as mother Nature will let me." He poured forth these words hurriedly, and with downcast face, and as he talked drew a light circle in the nearest flower-bed with his cane. It was only after a pause, and when his friend made no reply, that he raised his eyes and met, with some embarrassment, the quiet gaze fixed upon him. "You don't seem quite able to accept this change in my life all at once, Hans? Others besides you have had the same feeling--the person most concerned in it, for instance. That I have become a conceited ass, and fancy that because I used to be extravagantly fond of modeling all manner of absurdities in clay, and cutting caricatures of my friends in meerschaum--this I hope you will not believe. But why I can't get beyond the condition of a dilettante, if I only am serious about it, and think of and do nothing else but study my A, B, C, under a good master--I beg of you, my dear Dædalus, don't pull such a disheartening face! Don't look so sadly at the lost youth--as I probably seem to you; or at least smile ironically, so as to rouse my anger and wound my _amour propre_ a little! But by the eternal gods--what is there after all so horribly fatal in this decision? That it hasn't occurred to me till after twenty-seven years? That is bad, I admit, but not a proof that it is hopeless. Think of your own half-countryman, Asmus Carstens, or of--well, I won't give you a whole chapter of artists' biographies. And besides, when I am altogether independent and have burnt my ships behind me--"