"Allow me to ask," said Felix, after looking about blankly for a moment, "into whose room you have brought me? And is your good friend who practises this pious art hidden somewhere close by, so that one must be cautious in his criticisms?" "You needn't be in the least disturbed, my dear fellow; the lord and master of this worshipful company stands before you." "You, yourself? Dædalus with a saint's halo! The preacher in the wilderness of modern art actually at the foot of the cross! Before I believe that, I shall have to take the cowl myself, and declare poor naked Beauty to be an invention of the devil!" The sculptor cast down his eyes for a moment. "Yes, my dear fellow," he said, "this is what we have come to in our art-desert. You ask me for beauty, and I offer you clothes-racks with dolls'-heads! As long ago as when we were in Kiel, I had to learn that the world of to-day will have nothing to do with true art. You know how hard I found it to turn these stones of mine into bread. It was still worse when I moved to Hamburg, and there--" he checked himself suddenly, and turned away; "well, living is more expensive there, and I began to be older and less easily satisfied; and, when I could no longer support myself in the place--it was the wretched trading city's fault, I thought--I packed up my best models and sketches and came here, to the much-praised land of art, the 'Athens on the Iser,' of which so much is said and sung. You will soon learn how it is here. I won't begin as soon as you have crossed the threshold to sweep all the disagreeable things in the house out of the corners for you. I will only say that the Munich Philistine isn't a hair better than those on the Jungfernstieg or in our old Holstein. After I had managed, with great difficulty, to keep myself alive here for a year, and had hardly earned enough in the service of pure beauty to keep life in my body, I found that such misery was enough to make a man turn Catholic--and, as this spectacle shows, I did turn so, half-and-half. It wasn't so easy as it may seem to you here--to my shame! Besides a trace of conscience, which was always reminding me that 'Man, after all, has higher goals to seek Than simply feeding seven times a week;'