"You are talking to your own destruction, my dear sir," he said, raising his voice. "You might just as well declare in a mosque that Allah was not Allah, and Mohammed was not his prophet, as to assert to this crowd of enthusiastic youths that there is anything more divine than music, or that devotion to it, its service and its cultivation, could ever be pushed too far. Entrench yourself behind your blocks of marble, so that we may grant you peace on favorable terms. What would you say if some one declared that whoever uses his mallet nine hours of the day must, in the course of time, lose his sense of hearing and sight, that his intellectual power would finally become deadened and petrified, and that his soul would get to be as dusty and muddy as the blouse he wears when he hammers his stones?" A unanimous shout of bravos arose from the group standing nearest him, and a murmur of satisfaction ran through the _salon_. The countess, who now for the first time became aware of the dialogue, was seen hastily approaching, with the intention of averting the threatened storm by a timely word. But Jansen had already risen to his feet, and stood confronting the professor with the most unruffled composure. "What would I say?" he cried, loud enough to be understood by all. "I would say that in every art there are artists and mechanics, and that the latter know as little of the god whom they serve as the sexton who sweeps out the church and hands about the contribution-box. Of all the arts there is but one which does not know the dust of the workshop, that has no underlings and assistants, or, at the worst, merely charlatans who fancy themselves masters; and even these know nothing of that kind of mechanical readiness which murders the soul and deadens thought. For that reason it is the highest and most divine of the arts, before which the others bow, and which they ought to worship as their mistress and goddess. To you, who are in the habit of lecturing upon æsthetics, I should be ashamed to explain myself more fully by saying that I refer to poetry, were it not that in your toast you offered an insult to the majesty of this, the highest muse, which I can only excuse upon the supposition that you have strayed from the temple of the true divinity, and wandered by mistake into a mosque." With these words he raised his glass, held it before the flame of the lamp and slowly drank it off. A deathlike silence followed; the professor, who was apparently on the point of making a rather irritating reply, was restrained by a meaning look from the countess. She herself had looked at the sculptor while he spoke, with a peculiar, searching, flashing look, and merely threatened him playfully with her finger as he now advanced toward her as if to take leave. "Stay," she whispered to him, "I have a word to speak with you."