cannot grasp the stern saying over the door: 'Thou shalt have none other gods but me.' She has begun to work again, indeed, since yesterday; but defiance, and despair, and resignation, and all that--it may be all very fine; but it is not the muse. And neither is love the muse of art--let people say what they will. All this yearning of heart to heart, it is all very well, but just let a man try to work with a yearning heart, and see how soon his art gives way to the yearning! The artist must be cool to the centre of his heart. I have kept it so till now, and intend so to continue, and if ever you see the name of Justus Anders in a register of marriages, you need no longer look for it in the golden book of art; you would see a line drawn through the space where it may once have stood in alphabetical order." Reinhold would not allow this, any more than he would accept Justus's theory of the necessary one-sidedness of artists. He saw in the artist rather the complete, perfect man, to whom nothing in humanity was strange; the more than complete man even, who poured out his exuberant wealth, which otherwise must have overwhelmed him, in his works, and thus, beside the real world in which ordinary men dwelt, created for himself a second ideal world. And if Justus maintained that he had never loved, it might be true, although for his part he ventured slightly to doubt the strict truth of his assertion; but even if it were so, this great finder had merely not yet found the right object, and as he boasted of always finding the right object at the right moment, here, too, at the right moment the right object would certainly present itself. "That is a most unartistic view of the matter, my dear Reinhold!" cried Justus. "We, who according to your ideas are something of demi-gods, know better with what groans and creaks these beautiful creations are brought into life, and that at the best of times, when things go as smoothly as possible, you cannot boil anything without water. And as for love, you certainly have more experience in that, and experience, said Goethe's grey friend at Leipzig, is everything; but very often it is better to be without that experience." And Justus hummed the tune of "No fire, no coals, no ashes," as, with his modelling-tool grasped in both hands, he worked at the forehead of his clay figure. "Do not give expression to such profane notions this evening at the Kreisels'," said Reinhold. "Why not? It is the simple truth." "May be so; but it hurts good little Cilli to hear such things, especially from your mouth." "Why especially from my mouth?" "Because she sees in you her ideal." "In you, I should think." "Don't talk such nonsense, Justus!"