With Casper's return home, the household takes a turn for the cheerful. The lively young man is irrepresible, the perfect antodote to the Master's darker moods. He twits the older painter until he rushes out of the house for some badly-needed exercise that will dispell his vile mood.
Margarethe does not look on all the foolery with tolerance. Casper should know his place as she knows hers and she tells him so, without effect. The young man has been part of the household longer than she and has a different, perhaps better, sense of what his place there is.
Iris has caught Casper's attention as she caught the Master's, and as guilessly, and Casper misjudges how far he can go. He shows Iris the painting the master is making of her, the painting the Master forbade her to look at. It is of a very plain, dull peasant girl in a field of glorious wildflowers. Hardened though she is to comments about her lack of looks, Iris begins to cry.
No matter that Casper explains that the painting says only one thing: "Aren't the flowers beautiful?" Margarethe, never quick to defend her daughter, nonetheless tries to silence Casper, who comes back at her with, "She likes to look. Don't you know that about your daughter?" That is the one important thing about Iris from Casper's point of view, but to her, and her mother, even slow Ruth, the disobedient viewing has been a disaster.
The ugly but brief quarrel ends only when Iris pretends to be soothed by Ruth's toy windwill, the one she took, or was given, by the strange child in the house on the market square, back on the first full day the fatheress family was in the town. Trapped, Iris acts pleased, for Ruth's sake. To an unobservant eye, the storm appears to have passed—until the next morning.
(to be continued)
The picture is a detail of "The Young Artist" by Jan Lievens.