He was somewhat moved and made no answer. The thought then ran through his mind: Would it not have been more sensible...? He was sitting quite close to Therese and felt the warmth of her body, as he had done before in Lugano. In what dream of hers might she now be living—in the dark jumbled dream of making humanity happy, or the light gay dream of a new romantic adventure? She kept looking insistently out of the window. He took her hand, without resistance, and put it to his lips.
She suddenly turned round to him and said innocently: "Yes, stop now. I'd better get out here."
He let go her hand and looked at Therese.
"Yes, my dear George. What wouldn't one fall into," she said, "if one didn't"—she gave an ironic smile—"have to sacrifice oneself for humanity? Do you know what I often think?... Perhaps all this is only a flight from myself."
"Why.... Why do you take to flight?"
"Goodbye, George."
The vehicle stopped. Therese got out, a young man stood still and stared at her, she disappeared in the crowd. I don't think she'll finish up on the scaffold, thought George. He drove to his hotel, had his midday meal, lit a cigarette, changed his clothes and went to Ehrenbergs'.
James, Sissy, Willy Eissler and Frau Oberberger were with the ladies of the house in the dining-room taking black coffee. George sat down between Else and Sissy, drank a glass of Benedictine and answered with patience and good humour all the questions which his new activities had provoked. They soon went into the drawing-room, and he now sat for a time in the raised alcove with Frau Oberberger, who looked young again to-day and was particularly anxious to hear more intimate details about George's personal experiences in Detmold. She refused to believe him when he denied having started intrigues with all the singers in the place. Of course she simply regarded theatrical life as nothing but a pretext and opportunity for romantic adventures. Anyway, she always made a point of thinking she detected the most monstrous goings-on in the coulisses behind the curtain, in the dressing-rooms and in the manager's office. When George had no option but to disillusion her, by his report of the simple, respectable, almost philistine life of the members of the opera, and by the description of his own hardworking life, she visibly began to go to pieces, and soon he found himself sitting opposite an aged woman, in whom he recognised the same person as had appeared to him last summer, first in the box of a little white-and-red theatre and later in a now almost forgotten dream. He then went and stood with Sissy near the marble Isis, and each sought to find in the eyes of the other during their harmless chatter a memory of an ardent hour beneath the deep shade of a dark green park in the afternoon. But to-day that memory seemed to them both to be plunged in unfathomable depths.
Then he went and sat next to Else at the little table on which books and photographs were lying. She first addressed to him some conventional questions like all the rest. But suddenly she asked quite unexpectedly and somewhat gently: "How is your child?"
"My child...." He hesitated. "Tell me, Else, why do you ask me...? Is it simply curiosity?"