"Perhaps if she loved me something would come back," he thought. "Anyway it would be nice to feel a woman in love with me again."
An innocuous sadness sat comfortably in his heart. Later he would embrace her. Kiss ... watch her undress. Things that would mean nothing.... But they might help waste time, and perhaps give him another glimpse of ... He paused in his thought and felt a dizziness enter his silence. Words spun. "The face of stars," he murmured under his breath, and laughed as Mathilde looked inquiringly up at him.
The café was deserted. Von Stinnes, alone in a booth, called "Hello" to them as they entered.
"We have the place almost to ourselves," he said. "There are some people in the other room."
He looked affectionately at the two as they sat down, and added, "How goes the courtship?"
"Gravely and with cautious cynicism," Dorn answered. "We find it difficult to overcome our sanities."
He smiled at the girl and covered her hand with his. Her eyes regarded him luminously. They sat eating their late meal, von Stinnes chatting of the latest developments.... A mob of communist workingmen had attacked the poet Muhsam while he was unburdening himself of proletarian oratory in the Schiller Square.
"They chased him for two blocks into the Palais," the Baron smiled, "and he lost his hat. And perhaps his portfolio. They are beginning to distrust the poets. They want something besides revolutionary iambics now. Muhsam, however, is content. He received a postal card this afternoon with a skull and cross-bones drawn on it informing him he would be assassinated Friday at 3 P.M. It was signed by 'The Society for the Abolition of Monstrosities.' He is having it done into an expressionist placard and it will undoubtedly restore his standing with the Council of Ten. Franz Lipp, the foreign minister, you know, has ordered all the telephones taken out of the foreign office building. It's an old failing of his—a phobia against telephones. They send him into fits when they ring. He has incidentally offered to sign a separate peace with the Entente. A crafty move, but premature. And the burghers have been ordered under pain of death to surrender all firearms within twenty-four hours."
The talk ran on. Mathilde, feigning sleep, placed her head on Dorn's shoulder.
"You play with the little one," whispered von Stinnes. "She is in love."