What clung to Marian’s soul was an immemorial prejudice against a gipsy’s life and a stroller’s fate. Her ancestors and her husband’s had always earned their livelihood in the honest ways of a trade. She could not see what the free tuition at Döderlein’s conservatory would avail Daniel, since he had nothing wherewithal to sustain life. He told her that Spindler had taught him how to play on the piano, that he would perfect his skill and so earn his sustenance. She shook her head. Then he spoke to her of the greatness of art, of the ecstasy which an artist could communicate and the immortality he might win, and that perhaps it would be granted him to create something unique and incomparable. But these words she thought mad and pretentious delusions, and smiled contemptuously. And at that his soul turned away from her, and she seemed a mother to him no more. When Jason Philip Schimmelweis learned what was afoot, he would not let the troublesome journey deter him, but appeared in Marian’s shop like an avenging angel. Daniel feared him no longer, since he had given up hoping for anything from him. He laughed to himself at the sight of the stubby, short-necked man in his rage. Gleams of mockery and of cunning still played over the red cheeks of Jason Philip, for he had a very high opinion of himself, and did not think the windy follies of a boy of nineteen worthy of the whole weight of his personality. While he talked his little eyes sparkled, and his red, little tongue pushed away the recalcitrant hairs of his moustache from his voluble lips. Daniel stood by the door, leaning against the post, his arms folded across his chest, and regarded now his mother, who, dumb and suddenly old, sat in a corner of the sofa, now the oil portrait of his father on the opposite wall. A friend of Gottfried Nothafft’s youth, a painter who had been long lost and forgotten like his other works, had once painted it. It showed a man of serious bearing, and brought to mind the princely guildsman of the Middle Ages. Seeing the picture at that moment enlightened Daniel as to the ancestral strain that had brought him to this mood and to this hour. And turning now once more to Jason Philip’s face, he thought he perceived in it the restlessness of an evil conscience. It seemed to him that this man was not acting from conviction but from an antecedent determination. It seemed to him further that he was faced, not merely by this one man and his rage and its accidental causes, but by a whole world in arms that was pledged to enmity against him. He had no inclination now to await the end of Jason Philip’s oratorical efforts, and left the room. Jason Philip grew pale. “Don’t let us deceive ourselves, Marian,” he said. “You have nursed a viper on your bosom.”