"Nonsense," he said, waving that aside impatiently. "Which is why," he continued, "I urge you to marry quickly. Then the woman, so unfortunately singled out by Providence to be something she is not fitted for, having married and secured her husband, prey, victim. Or whatever you prefer to call him—"
"I prefer to call him husband," I said.
"—if she succeeds in steering clear of detaining and delaying objects like cradles, is cured and can go back with proper serenity to that which alone matters. Art and the work necessary to produce it. But she will have wasted time," he said, shaking his head. "She will most sadly have wasted time."
In my turn I said Nonsense, and laughed with that heavenly, glorious security one has when one has a lover.
I expect there are some people who may be as Kloster says, but we're not like them, Bernd and I. We're not going to waste a minute. He adores my music, and his pride in it inspires me and makes me glow with longing to do better and better for his sake, so as to see him moved, to see him with that dear look of happy triumph in his eyes. Why, I feel lifted high up above any sort of difficulty or obstacle life can try to put in my way. I'm going to work when I get to Berlin as I never did before.
I said something like this to Kloster, who replied with great tartness that I oughtn't to want to do anything for the sake of producing a certain look in somebody's eyes. "That is not Art, Mees Chrees. That is nothing that will ever be any good. You are, you see, just the veriest woman; and here—" he almost cried—"is this gift, this precious immortal gift, placed in such shaky small hands as yours."
"I'm very sorry," I said, feeling quite ashamed that I had it, he was so much annoyed.
"No, no," he said, relenting a little, "do not be sorry—marry. Marry quickly. Then there may be recovery."
And when he was saying good-bye—I tell you this because it will amuse you—he said with a kind of angry grief that if Providence were determined in its unaccountable freakishness to place a gift which should be so exclusively man's in the shell or husk (I forget which he called it, but anyhow it sounded contemptuous), of a woman, it might at least have selected an ugly woman. "It need not," he said angrily, "have taken one who was likely in any case to be selected for purposes of love-making, and given her, besides the ordinary collection of allurements provided by nature to attract the male, a Beethovenkopf. Never should that wide sweep of brow and those deep set eyes, the whole noble thoughtfulness of such a head,"—you mustn't think me vain, little mother, he positively said all these things and was so angry—"have been combined with the rubbish, in this case irrelevant and actually harmful, that goes to make up the usual pretty young face. Mees Chrees, I could have wished you some minor deformity, such as many spots, for then you would not now be in this lamentable condition of being loved and responding to it. And if," he said as a parting shot, "Providence was determined to commit this folly, it need not have crowned it by choosing an Englishwoman."
"What?" I said, astonished, following him out on to the steps, for he has always seemed to like and admire us.