“There’s Von Ibn gone north, declaring that his future is completely ruined, and you sit crying like a baby because you must leave him, and yet you won’t marry him. If he was some worthless scoundrel that couldn’t be thought of, you know very well that all we might try to say or do wouldn’t keep you from him for three minutes; but just because he is so eminently all right you see a necessity for cooking up a sort of tragedy out of nothing, and making him crazy, and yourself about as bad.”
“Have you heard from him?” she asked coldly.
“I know that he left Munich yesterday early. He must have been awfully cut up to have been willing to undertake a trip at that hour. He hates to get up early—”
“That’s no crime.”
“Who said it was? So far from being a crime, it ought to have been another bond of congeniality between you two.”
“If he was a man at home he’d take to drink and go to the devil, but being a fellow over here I suppose that he’ll just go up the Zug-spitz and down the Matterhorn, and up Mont Blanc and down the Dent du Midi, until he considers himself whole again.”
She choked and said no more.
The train guard came through soon after and put the usual question:
“Wo fahren Sie hin?”