“After all this time....” And Anne thought how wonderful it was that the old friend should come back just this day when she felt her life so poor and lonely. Joy came to her heart for a moment. It seemed to her that her youth, her girlhood, had returned to her, with everything that distance embellished.
Adam Walter was grave and serious like a man who has painful memories to bury in himself. Yet his eyes followed Anne’s movements eagerly while she reached to light the lamp. He longed and feared to see her face again.
“She has suffered since I have seen her,” thought Adam Walter, “and it has beautified her.” Anne’s veiled voice and her look broke open in him a wound which he thought had long ago healed. He too remembered his youth, when he went away from her all unsuspecting, when he worked, when he dreamed. Then he heard that Anne had married and in the same instant he realized that he loved her. He had loved her always.
She seemed strangely tall and slender to him. The flame flared up.
“To be here again with you ... it’s too good to be true.”
“You ought not to speak like that.” Anne smiled her old, young smile, “or do you still say everything that passes through your mind? Do you remember the Ferdinand Müllers? And the new sign, the white head of Æsculapius? How we laughed....”
“In those times everything was different,” said Walter dryly.
Anne looked at him. “He too has become old. How hard his looks are,” and the smile that had rejuvenated her vanished from her face.
And Walter’s voice became ironical.
“And I thought I would create like God, just like Him. Then my opera failed, nobody wanted my sonatas. Nobody ... and now I am humbly thankful to become assistant professor in the National Academy of music.” He laughed lifelessly. “But perhaps it was bound to be like that. When a man in his youth wants to become like God, he becomes at least an assistant professor in the end; who knows that if he had started with the ambition of becoming an assistant professor he would have ended by becoming nothing at all.”