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.

"A more desolate communication between souls than that which then passed
between father and daughter could hardly be imagined. The father spoke of
humanity and all its experiences in a tone of the bitterest scorn. He
despised men, and himself amongst them; and rejoiced to think that the
generations rose and vanished, brood after brood, as the crops of corn
grew and disappeared. Lilith, who listened to it all unmoved, taking only
an intellectual interest in the question, remarked that even the corn had
more life than that; for, after its death, it rose again in the new crop.
Whether she meant that the corn was therefore superior to man, forgetting
that the superior can produce being without losing its own, or only
advanced an objection to her father's argument, Wolkenlicht could not
tell. But Teufelsbuerst laughed like the sound of a saw, and said: 'Follow
out the analogy, my Lilith, and you will see that man is like the corn