Even after Julie had read the letter to the end, she did not at once break the silence. Not until some time had elapsed did she send the child up to Aunt Angelica with her love, and the question whether she might be allowed to stay up there for a quarter of an hour. Then she stepped up to the window where Jansen stood in silence, laid her hand on his shoulder, and said:
"Now if I should guess what it is that secretly troubles you, my dearest friend, would you confess it to me then?"
He turned, and passionately folded her in his arms. "Julie!" he said--"what good would that do? There are some difficulties that are insurmountable. I can only feel sure you have not vanished from the world when I hold you to my heart, press my lips to yours, feel my hand in yours--"
"Be still!" she said, smiling, and gently disengaging herself from him. "I didn't send Frances away for you to forget all that you have so solemnly promised me. Let us be sensible, my dear friend--indeed we must be. Sit down over there, and try, for once, to listen to me, instead of looking at me. Do you know, I consider it positively discourteous of you to pay no attention to my wisest words, merely because, after such a long acquaintance, your eyes still find something about me to 'study?'"
"O Julie!" he said, and a sad smile passed over his face. "If words could only help--if the sense and understanding and all the strength of soul of a noble woman could but avail against the treachery and unreasonableness of gods and men! But speak, and I will close my eyes and listen."
"Do you know, you and your young friend are sick of one and the same illness?" she now said, for he had covered his eyes with his hand and taken a seat on the sofa, while she stood leaning upon the window-sill.
"I and Felix? I don't understand you."
"You have both come into the world too late, you are both wandering anachronisms, as he says of himself alone in his letter. His energy and your artistic nature to-day no longer find the soil and air that are good for them, and that they deserve. When I look about me, dearest, I say to myself: 'Where are now the people, the prince, the century to appreciate this power, to lay commissions, reward, honor, and admiration at the feet of this creative spirit? to post sonnets on the door of his workshop, to make a passage for him when he strides among the multitude, as we read that the ancients did, and the great men, under the rule of the famous popes and the pomp-loving princes?'--Oh! my dearest friend, I could weep tears of blood when I think how, instead of all this, you live here, appreciated only by a circle of good friends and enthusiastic disciples, and are made the butt of stupid malice or blind ignorance in all the newspapers! And then, when a demand arises for the production of some work to adorn a square or a building, wretched quacks, who are not worthy to unloose the latchet of your shoes, come running up by all sorts of back-stairs and secret ways, and steal the prize away from you, and you remain hidden in the dark! Now, don't shake your head! I know how you think about the applause of the masses, and how little you begrudge it to the poor wretches who hear no divine voice within them. But be honest now--if this monument"--she mentioned the name of a man to whom a statue had just been erected, on which occasion Jansen's application had, as usual, been rejected--"if this commission had fallen to you--and then another had followed close upon that--how differently you would stand in your own esteem when you had become a central figure of your time! To say nothing of the fact that then you would be able to close the factory, as you call it, next door, and would have no need to strike a blow of the mallet that did not come straight from the heart!"
She had talked herself into a state of great excitement; and now, when he looked up at her, the shining brightness of her look and the soft glow of her cheeks enraptured him. But he controlled himself and remained seated.
"What you say is all very wise and true," he said. "But for all that you don't quite hit the sore spot. I have known all this ever since my eyes were first opened to what went on around me, to what some people produce and other people admire. Yet in spite of that I have become what I am, and what I could no more have helped becoming than I could have helped coming into the world. Remember, too, how much better off I am than our friend Felix. As far as the outside world goes, we are both hampered and confined. The age has as little appreciation of high art as of the great personal activity toward which all his powers and wishes urge him. But I can at least put before myself and a half dozen true friends what there is in me, even if it has no fuller life than this; while our friend's special strengths can only reveal themselves in putting him at odds with everybody.