But much as he liked to disparage German sentiment, he could not find it in his heart to refuse the widow of the landscape-painter when she offered him the house on the lake for a price that could hardly be called low. Without any further inspection of the place he concluded the bargain, and, without changing a muscle, quietly suffered the malicious laughter which burst upon him from all sides to die out. "To possess something," he said, calmly, "was not at all the same thing as to be possessed by something." For that reason he would not need to join in their raving, merely because he found himself among people who were crazy and enraptured. And, true to his theory, whenever he was at his villa he pursued his usual comfortable sybarite life, and maintained that Nature had very great charms if one only looked at it with one's back. He had had the house, which was built in a rustic style, most comfortably fitted up, with a great variety of sofas, rugs, and easy-chairs, and always had this or that friend with him as a guest; so that even the studio above the tree-tops, in which he himself never set foot, was not altogether lost to its proper use. Heavenly repose, he used to say, would not be nearly as sublime if there were not mortals in the world to bestir themselves and cultivate the field of art with the sweat of their brows. Now, this year he had taken his aesthetical opposite, good Philip Emanuel Kohle, out with him; had quartered him in the chamber to the left of the little dining-room--he himself occupying the one on the right--and it is almost unnecessary to add, had given him the exclusive use of the studio. For the rest, they only met at dinner and supper, since the morning slumbers of the host lasted too long for the industrious guest to wait breakfast for him. Moreover, they could never come together without getting into some discussion, which was always welcome to Rossel, and, as he asserted, highly favorable to his digestion at any time of the day except in the morning. The more he saw of him the more pleasure Rossel took in this singular, self-communing man, who, bloodless, insignificant-looking, and unsophisticated as he seemed, bore about with him a truly royal self-respect, and the consciousness of immeasurable joys and possessions, without for a moment demanding that any mortal being should acknowledge his inherent sovereign rights. Then, too, though he was so unassuming and so thankful for proffered friendship, he conducted himself toward his host with perfect freedom, for he held the most sublime doctrines in regard to the earthly goods that were lacking in his own case, but were so richly at the disposal of his friend.