She might have been about as old as he, that is, a little past thirty. She sat on a low foot-stool in a dark-blue paint-spotted apron-dress, resting her chin on her hand. Her brown hair, tightly combed and already turning gray on either side, covered her temples in soft waves and supplied the frame for her dark Slavic face, infinitely appealing in its expression, with a pug-nose, sharply prominent cheek bones, and small, glittering black eyes. Expectant, distrustful, and as it were irritated, she squinted askance at her work ... He stood beside her, his right hand on his hip, his left rapidly twisting his brown moustache. His slanting eyebrows showed a gloomy and strained agitation, while he softly whistled to himself, as usual. His attire, most carefully selected and in excellent taste, was a suit of quiet gray and of conservative cut. But in his work-lined brow, above which his dark hair was so very simply and correctly parted, there was a nervous quiver, and the features of his Southern countenance were already sharply marked, as if a hard burin had gone over them and brought them into higher relief, whereas his mouth seemed so soft in outline, his chin so gently formed ... After a time he drew his hand over brow and eyes and turned away. "I ought not to have come," he said. "Why not, Tonio Kröger?" "I have just got up from my work, Lisaveta, and the inside of my head looks exactly like your canvas. A framework, a dim sketch soiled with alterations, and a few dabs of color, to be sure; and now I come here and see the same. And the conflict and contrast that tormented me at home I find here too," and he sniffed the air. "It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind. Fixative and the aroma of spring, isn't that it? Art and--well, what is the other? Do not say 'Nature,' Lisaveta, 'Nature' does not exhaust it. Oh, no, I think I ought rather to have gone walking, although it is a question whether I should have felt any better: five minutes ago, not far from here, I met a colleague, Adalbert the novelist, and he said in his aggressive way, 'Damn the spring! It is and always will be the most horrible season. Can you lay hold of one sensible idea, Kröger, can you work out the tiniest point or effect with any calmness, when you are feeling an indecent prickling in your blood and are upset by a whole mass of irrelevant sensations which so soon as you test them are unmasked as unmistakably trivial and wholly unusable stuff? As for me, I am going to the café now. That is neutral ground, untouched by the change of seasons, you see; it represents, so to speak, the remote and elevated sphere of the literary, where one is capable of none but distinguished ideas ...' And he went to the café, and perhaps I ought to have gone along." Lisaveta was amused.