"Quite sure; I have studied you of late thoroughly, and I have found that you are one of the finest specimens of a species of our race, which is quite common in our day--descendants of the departed Doctor Faust, _faustuli posthumi_, so to say, who have cut off their long doctors' beards and exchanged the romantic costume of the Middle Ages for the modern dress coat, without, however, losing their relish for all kinds of enjoyment, and, like Faust, starving in the midst of enjoyment." "Problematic characters, Baron Oldenburg calls them," said Oswald. "A capital definition," answered the doctor. "To be sure, the baron ought to know, for he belongs to the brotherhood, and I dare say he ranks high among them. At least I judge so from what I hear, for I have never spoken to him, and seen him only once." "The baron is an enigmatic character, whom it is very difficult to judge fairly." "How else could he be a problematic character? I am told you are one of the baron's special friends--one of the few he has on earth. And that is why I speak frankly. I cannot approve it, that a man of such eminent talents should waste his life in idleness--in a kind of busy idleness, the greatest reproach, in my opinion, that can be made against a man in our day, when there is so very much to be done." "How can the poor baron help it, if the bread and butter of every day's life are not to his taste?" "Do you think I like it?" said Doctor Braun, and he flushed up and his eyes sparkled; "do you think that the great god Apollo, when he watched the cattle of Admetus, and ate the mean food of a slave in the shade of an oak-tree, did not long for the ambrosia and nectar on the golden tables in the house of Zeus? Nevertheless he bore his fate and endured it, as a greater one did after him. But I have always thought that the true lot of man upon earth is to be subject to all that is human, and yet never to forget the heavenly part within him; to contend until death with the raving wolves of tyranny and falsehood, and to bear the cross of all that is vulgar and mean, for the sake of that which follows after Golgotha."