The conversation flowed now more smoothly. She spoke of his father, and expressed her gratitude as his ward. "That is a mighty nature of his, which guards itself against everything common," said she, at once, against the fashion of the quality, speaking even partially of persons. The son was made happy by this praise of a father; he enhanced it, and asked in pleased expectation how she took his coldness. "Coldness?" said she, with liveliness, "I hate the word cordially. If ever a rare man has a whole will and no half of one, and rests upon his power, and does not, like a crustaceous animal, cleave to every other, then he is called cold. Is not the sun, when he approaches us, cold too?" "Death is cold," cried Albano, very much moved, because he often imagined that he himself had more force than love; "but there may well be a sublime coldness, a sublime pain, which with eagle's talon snatches the heart away on high, but tears it in pieces in mid-heaven and before the sun." She looked upon him with a look of greatness. "Truly you speak like a woman," said she; "they alone have nothing to will or to do without the might of love; but it was prettily said." Dian, good for nothing as to general observations, and apt only at individual ones, interrupted her with questions about particular works of art in Naples; she very frankly communicated her characteristic views, although with tolerable decision. Albano thought at first of his artistic friend, the draughtsman Schoppe, and asked about him. "At my departure," said she, "he was still in Pestitz, though I cannot comprehend what such an extraordinary being would fain do there; that is a powerful man, but quite jumbled up and not clear. He is very much your friend." "How does," asked Dian, half joking, "my old patron, the Lector Augusti?" She answered concisely, and almost with a certain sensitiveness at the familiarity of his question: "It goes well with him at court. Few natures," she continued, turning to Albano, on the subject of Augusti, "are doomed to meet so much injustice of judgment as such simple, cool, consistent ones as his." Albano could not entirely say yes, but he recognized with satisfaction in her respect for the strangest individuality of character the pupil of his father, who prized a plant, not according to the smoothness or roughness of its skin, but according to its bloom. Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another's. But Linda's lofty candor on the subject, which is as often wanting in finely cultivated females as refinement and reserve are in powerful men, took the strongest hold of the youth, and he thought he should be sinning if he did not exercise his great natural frankness towards her in a twofold degree.