‘And has the Herr Professor praised your performances of late?’
‘He has not—he has blamed them,’ said she, her cheek burning, but firmly resolved to confess the worst—to conceal nothing.
‘It would have been odd indeed if he had done so. Has he seen this last one that I have just been looking at?’
‘No one has seen it but yourself,’ she replied, almost inaudibly.
‘It is not quite so bad as the other two. The head shows some signs of good workmanship, but the whole thing is poor and meretricious; and you know it is. Those other two studies, or attempts at studies, show a distinct and visible falling off. They are not so good by a long way as the little sketch you showed me at Trockenau. They are careless, sketchy, weak, and horribly amateurish. They are second-rate in every way—fit for magazine woodcuts—but as works of art! They are dreadful, and quite destitute of workmanship, and I am very sorry to see them.’
‘Oh, Herr Falkenberg!’ she exclaimed, aghast. ‘You—but I deserve it. They are all that you say.’
She spoke with a proud humility, but her voice was stifled with suppressed sobs. His relentless words had aroused, as if by magic, the old spirit of eager ambition which, until a few months ago, had animated her. It was as if some one roughly shook her from some pleasant drowsy dream back into reality. In her own mind she had tried—not very successfully, it is true, but still with the effect of lulling herself into contentment—to call those inadequate attempts at pictures ‘vague fancies,’ ‘thoughts too subtle at once to take shape.’ Consummate criticism, neutral, calm and unimpassioned, fixed its piercing eyes upon them, and instantly pronounced them—daubs.
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.’