The morning after Ingigerd’s departure to Mr. Lilienfeld’s home, when Frederick sat in front of his modelling in a new smock of unbleached linen of Miss Burns’s buying, he experienced a sense of relief on Ingigerd’s account.  A burden had been lifted from him.  Her change of home had removed a part of the responsibility from his shoulders and made a break in the feeling he had had of their belonging to each other.

After the rehearsal, Ingigerd was much discussed in the studio.  Ritter had expressed to Miss Burns and his friends a desire to make a model of the dancing girl for a bronze statuette.  Miss Burns told Frederick of his wish.  But Frederick, who was still regarded somewhat in the light of Ingigerd’s guardian, assented unwillingly.

“You see, Miss Eva,” he said, “I am really the last person in the world to stand in the way when beautiful things are to be created.  But I am only a man, and if Ritter were to use Miss Hahlstroem as a model here, where only one or two walls would separate us, that would mean an end to my peace of soul.”  Miss Burns laughed.  “You may well laugh,” he said, “but I am a convalescent, and relapses, you know, are worse than the sickness they follow.”

A week passed, in which Frederick carried on a remarkable, but not, as yet, victorious warfare.  He worked in the studio daily, and Miss Burns became his confidante.  From his own mouth she learned what she had already observed, that he was languishing in the chains of an unhappy passion.  Without ever interfering in his spiritual struggles unless he positively demanded it of her, she gave him advice as a good friend and comrade.

“Every time I see Ingigerd, or go out with her, or spend any time at all with her,” he said, “I feel outraged and bored.  I have firmly made up my mind not to go back to her.”—­A resolution frequently broken a few hours after it was made.

Miss Eva was so long-suffering that Frederick never felt compelled to drop the theme of Ingigerd Hahlstroem.  The girl’s soul was turned inside out and back again.

One day Ingigerd said to him: 

“Take me, seduce me, do with me whatever you will, Frederick.  Be strict, be cruel with me.  Lock me up.  You are the only man I want to have anything to do with me any more.”  Another time she said beseechingly:  “I want to be good, Frederick.  Make me good.”

But the very next day she again subjected her friend and protector to unpardonably vile treatment.  The fact was, she already had a following of men, running errands for her, attending to her affairs, thinking for her, and paying for her.

The thing that Frederick could not wean himself from was that sweet, fair, frail, pathetic body.  Yet he was determined to wean himself.

One day Ingigerd came to sit for Miss Burns for her portrait.  Frederick placed a revolving stand in front of her and also tried to model the blonde Madonna in clay.  Even Ritter had a mass of clay for modelling a bust of her prepared on a revolving stand, and the master entered into rivalry with his pupils.  Miss Burns’s purpose in arranging these sittings was not easily fathomed.  The result was, however, that the very severe study of his idol’s features had a remarkable effect upon Frederick.