How much greater that beauty
might be, if it ever blossomed into a beauty of soul, Wolkenlicht never
imagined; for he soon loved her enough to attribute to her all the
possibilities of her face as actual possessions of her being. To account
for everything that seemed to contradict this perfection, his brain was
prolific in inventions; till he was compelled at last to see that she was
in the condition of a rose-bud, which, on the point of blossoming, had
been chilled into a changeless bud by the cold of an untimely frost. For
one day, after the father and daughter had become a little more accustomed
to his silent presence, a conversation began between them, which went on
until he saw that Teufelsbuerst believed in nothing except his art. How
much of his feeling for that could be dignified by the name of belief,
seeing its objects were such as they were, might have been questioned. It
seemed to Wolkenlicht to amount only to this: that, amidst a thousand
distastes, it was a pleasant thing to reproduce on the canvas the forms he
beheld around him, modifying them to express the prevailing feelings of
his own mind.
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