It was still a question which of the two would first turn his attention from himself, and hear his companion’s voice. Weikhardt, whose eyes had grown sombre, spoke again: “O this dumb loneliness in a studio, with one’s hundred failures, and the ghosts of one’s thousand hours of despair! I have a chance to marry, and I’m going to take it, too. The girl has no money, to be sure, but she has a heart. She’s not afraid of my poverty, and comprehends the necessary quixotism of an artist’s life. She comes of a Protestant family of very liberal traditions, but two years ago she became a Catholic. When I first met her I was full of suspicion, and assumed all sorts of reasons for her step except the simple and human ones. It’s very difficult to see the simple and the human things, and still more difficult to do them. Gradually I understood what it means--to believe! and I understood what is to be reverenced in such faith. It is faith itself that is sacred, not that in which the faith is placed. It doesn’t matter what one has faith in--a book, a beast, a man, a star, a god. But it must be pure faith--immovable and unconquerable. Yes, I quite agree with you--we need simple faith.” So they had found each other through a word. “When do I get my picture, your Descent from the Cross?” Imhof inquired. Weikhardt did not answer the question. As he talked on, his smooth, handsome, boyish face assumed the aspect of a quarrelsome old man’s. Yet his voice remained gentle and slow, and his bearing phlegmatic. “Humanity to-day has lost its faith,” he continued. “Faith has leaked out like water from a cracked glass. Our age is tyrannised by machinery: it is a mob rule without parallel. Who will save us from machinery and from business? The golden calf has gone mad. The spirit of man kowtows to a warehouse. Our watchword is to be up and doing. We manufacture Christianity, a renaissance, culture, et cetera. If it’s not quite the real thing, yet it will serve. Everything tends toward the external--toward expression, line, arabesque, gesture, mask. Everything is stuck on a hoarding and lit by electric lamps. Everything is the very latest, until something still later begins to function. Thus the soul flees, goodness ceases, the form breaks, and reverence dies. Do you feel no horror at the generation that is growing up? The air is like that before the flood.” “Create, O artist, and don’t philosophize,” Imhof said gently.