She had come nearer to him as she spoke. Now she turned away again, consumed by a feeling of burning, scorching shame, and walked back to the window, and stood there, feeling utterly miserable. ‘Love is enough,’ she had lately read somewhere; but it was not true, she found—it did not support or comfort her under this just condemnation. It did not enable her to feel callous and indifferent under the disapproval and displeasure of such a man as Rudolf Falkenberg. She remained standing by the window. He had begun to pace about the studio, his hands clasped behind him. Presently he spoke: ‘I congratulated you just now on your happiness,’ he said. ‘If this is to be the result, I must withdraw those congratulations.’ ‘Herr Falkenberg, don’t—please don’t say that!’ she implored, in a voice that was pitiable, though so low. ‘But I must, if you allow it thus to enervate you—to emasculate your power. Pardon my frankness, and what may seem my intrusiveness; but you know my motives. Do you mean to give up your art?’ ‘No—oh no! I never thought of such a thing.’ ‘Then look to what you are doing. Such things as those you have showed me—such thin, weak, boneless, bloodless things are a mere prostitution of one of the noblest and most glorious of arts. For heaven’s sake, if you do not intend to do better than that, give it up altogether. Surely you are above such amateur dabbling, such sentimental prettinesses—you, who might do well and worthily, even nobly, I believe, if you only would. And, if you intend to persevere, let me tell you that the “happiness,” or the “good fortune,” or whatsoever it may be, which degrades your powers instead of expanding them, is _bad_. Sorrow rightly borne, and noble joy rightly worn, should elevate, not degrade. There is no evading this law, and no escaping it for those who have souls at all; and I was firmly convinced that you had. What has one of your own countrymen said, one of the most consummate art-critics that ever lived? He has said just the same thing—“accurately, in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and the purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art— ... with absolute precision, from the highest to the lowest, the fineness of the possible art is an index of the moral purity and majesty of the emotion it expresses.” That is one of the hardest things ever written, and one of the truest. Measure yourself by it, with _those_—and where are you?’