"Better so than to have the Promethean vulture peck it out for you."
"Well, if I am as you say, what am I to do? I am docile, to-day."
"Fall in love."
"I have tried the experiment."
"It must have been with some insipid girl, not out of her teens, odorous of bread and butter, innocent of wiles, and ignorant of her capabilities and your own."
"Perhaps, but still I have been in love,—and am."
"Bless me! that was a sigh! The sleeping waters then did show a dimple. Why, man, you talk about love, with that smooth, shepherd's face of yours, that contented air, that smoothly sonorous voice! Corydon and Phyllis! You should be like a grand piano after Satter has thundered out all its chords, tremulous with harmonies verging so near to discord that pain would be mixed with pleasure in the divinest proportions."
Greenleaf clapped his hands. "Bravo, Easelmann! you have mistaken your vocation; you should turn musical critic."
"The arts are all akin," he replied, calmly refilling his pipe.
"I think I can put together the various parts of your lecture for you," said Greenleaf. "You think I see Nature in her gentler moods, and reproduce only her placid features. You think I have feeling, though latent,—undeveloped. My nerves need a banging, just enough not to wholly unstring them. For that pleasant experience, I am to fall in love. The woman who has the nature to magnetize, overpower, transport me is Miss Marcia Sandford. I am, therefore, to make myself as uncomfortable as possible, in pursuit of a pleasure I know beforehand I can never obtain. Then, from the rather prosaic level of Scumble, I shall rise to the grand, gloomy, and melodramatic style of Salvator Rosa. Voilà tout!