work in clay was the figure of a middle-aged Neptune at a fountain, looking with a jolly smile at a huge fish in his hands.  There was a completed plaster cast of St. George, frankly inspired by its glorious model, the St. George of Donatello in the National Museum in Florence.  In all these works, Ritter had struck a happy medium between the Greeks and Donatello and created a style fully expressing his own personality, yet showing permissible dependence upon his predecessors.

The pieces in this room were without exception meant for the country residence of an American Croesus, who had taken a tremendous fancy to the young sculptor and his work and jealously tried to keep his creations from straying into another’s possession.  He looked upon himself as a Medici of the nineteenth century.  His marble palace in extensive grounds on Long Island had already swallowed up millions of dollars, though meant as a residence merely for himself, his wife, and his only daughter.  No one but Ritter was to do the statuary and sculptural decorations for his house and garden, and he was to have free play.  What commissions are given in America!  Were talents as easy to create in “our country” as dollars, there would be a second Renaissance even greater than the great Italian Renaissance.

Frederick was fairly intoxicated by the young man’s singular good fortune.  What he particularly admired was the union of success and merit.  When he compared the abundance of these works, tossed off apparently as in play, and the young man’s cheerful evenness of temper with his own torn, distracted existence, a feeling came upon him that he had never before had, the feeling that he was an outcast, a feeling of discouragement and helpless defeat.  While the light of the candles glided over the creations of the man who had infused form and soul into the formless clay, a voice within him kept saying: 

“You have frittered away your existence, you have wasted your days, you will never retrieve your loss.”

And the voice of envy, of bitter reproach against a nameless being asked why he had not been permitted to find a similar path and follow it in time.

Ritter’s life had received a wrench in Europe.  Some brutal mishap while he was serving in the army had made him revolt and later desert.  Now, after seven years in America, he was compelled to admit that the wrench had been indispensable for transplanting the sapling to the soil best suited to its growth.  In the new surroundings, Ritter’s nature developed simply, harmoniously and symmetrically, like a tree with plenty of space and sunlight.  Fate atoned for the lack of military subordination in the young prince from genius-land by granting him a surplus of superordination.

Suddenly Ritter said to Frederick: 

“I understand Toussaint, the Berlin sculptor, was on board the Roland.”

Peter Schmidt had warned the artists in an aside not to touch upon the disaster, telling them his friend was very nervous and a reference to the accident might have a bad effect upon him.  But his warning had been forgotten.