At first Paul Schlieben was very pleased to see his wife so enthusiastic. He politely carried her camp-stool and easel for her, and never lost patience when he remained for hours and hours near her whilst she worked. He lay in the scanty shadow of a palm-tree, and used to follow the movements of her brush over the top of his book. How fortunate that her art gave her so much satisfaction. Even though it was a little fatiguing for him to lie about doing nothing he must not say anything, no, he must not, for he had nothing to offer her as a compensation, nothing whatever. And he sighed. It was the same sigh that had escaped him when the numerous flaxen-haired little children were playing about on the sandy roads in the Brandenburg March, the same sigh which Sundays drew from him, when he used to see all the proletariat of the town--man and wife and children, children, children--wandering to the Zoo. Yes, he was right--he passed his hand a little nervously across his forehead--that writer was right--now, who could it be?--who had once said somewhere: "Why does a man marry? Only to have children, heirs of his body, of his blood. Children to whom he can pass on the wishes and hopes that are in him and also the achievements; children who are descended from him like shoots from a tree, children who enable a man to live eternally." That was the only way in which life after death could be understood--life eternal. The resurrection of the body, which the Church promises, was to be interpreted as the renewal of one's own personality in the coming generations. Oh, there was something great, something indescribably comforting in such a survival. "Are you speculating about something?" asked his wife. She had looked up from her easel for a moment. "Eh? What? Did you say anything, darling?" The man started up in a fright, as one who has been straying along forbidden paths. She laughed at his absent-mindedness; it was getting worse and worse. But what was he thinking of? Business?--surely not. But perhaps he wanted to write a novel, a tale? Why should he not try his hand at that for once in a way? That was something quite different from sending short chatty accounts of one's journey to one of the papers. And of course he would be able to do it. People who had not half the education, not half the knowledge, not half the aesthetic refinement of feeling he had wrote quite readable books. She talked brightly and persuasively to him, but he shook his head with a certain resignation: nonsense, neither novels nor any other kind of writing. And he thought to himself: it is always said that a piece of work is like a child--that is to say, only a truly great piece of work, of course. Was the work he and his wife created work in that sense? Work that would exist eternally? He suddenly found things to censure severely in her picture, which he had politely admired only the day before.