Gottlieb. His discovery of the truth will be frightful.
4th Student. That ’s the joke. But you should have joined us at the beginning: there’s no doubt he loves the girl—loves a model he might hire by the hour!
Gottlieb. See here! “He has been accustomed,” he writes, “to have Canova’s women about him, in stone, and the world’s women beside him, in flesh; these being as much below, as those above, his soul’s aspiration: but now he is to have the reality.” There you laugh again! I say, you wipe off the very dew of his youth.
1st Student. Schramm! (Take the pipe out of his mouth, somebody!) Will Jules lose the bloom of his youth?
Schramm. Nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world: look at a blossom—it drops presently, having done its service and lasted its time; but fruits succeed, and where would be the blossom’s place could it continue? As well affirm that your eye is no longer in your body, because its earliest favorite, whatever it may have first loved to look on, is dead and done with—as that any affection is lost to the soul when its first object, whatever happened first to satisfy it, is superseded in due course. Keep but ever looking, whether with the body’s eye or the mind’s, and you will soon find something to look on! Has a man done wondering at women?—there follow men, dead and alive, to wonder at. Has he done wondering at men?—there ’s God to wonder at: and the faculty of wonder may be, at the same time, old and tired enough with respect to its first object, and yet young and fresh sufficiently, so far as concerns its novel one. Thus…
