Richard swung round and surveyed with disfavour Lothar’s vague features under their bush of upstanding tow. “Do you mean there’s really anything for him to find out about you and the other girl, or are you swanking?”
“Only that I schwärm—I swarm with love for her. I watch in the streets, and once I drop at her feet a fair rose costing fifty pfennig. She knows nothing of my passion. But what goes me that on? It is more beautiful, more ideal, so.” Suddenly he slid from lofty altitudes. “One has also one’s emotions away from these. One is flesh. One is not altogether air....” He spattered a few inky hints regarding the demands of his adolescence. From a pink, chubby face his spectacles glittered knowingly, inviting his companion to betrayal of like perplexities. But Richard preserved that admirable stolidity for which his looks were so well adapted: powerful jaw, big nose, dark head well thrust forward from the short neck and broad shoulders; and, rather obscured by all these pugnacities, a pair of pleasant, humorous light-grey eyes, from which now, however, he had chased all expression save of blank idiocy. Not likely he would give himself away to Master Lothar! Richard wondered if there were a German boy good form enough to know that Lothar was bad form, and to ostracize him as such. Unlikely; the fellow would hardly be as cocksure if he had once been put in his place. All this blither about Goethe and girls.... “Do you mean to marry this person?” interrupting the other’s critical appraisement of a lady professionally well-known in Dorzheim, appraisement to which Lothar had essayed to impart the personal note.
“I have explained,” patiently, “I am plighted to Frieda-Marie. She is a good Christian maiden. She learns cooking. She has a respectable gift-along. Why do you smile?”
“Your English is so funny.”
“I have not yet had the pleasure of hearing your German,” politely sarcastic. For Richard had felt in honour bound not to reveal to Dorzheim that his knowledge of their tongue, though faulty, was fluent enough, as was natural in a grandson of Hermann Marcus of Munich.
“I will take me a wife when I am twenty-seven. First must I be through with my examinations. Then do I perform my military service. You also? No?”
“Oh, we don’t have to fag with that sort of thing in England.”
“It is for the Fatherland. Also one is attractive in uniform. One dashes. One lives. Me, I must betray a several of maidens before I can afford one to keep.”
Richard scowled discouragement. “You’re not sixteen yet, are you?”
“At sixteen one is no longer a child. One cannot go mad....” To Richard’s horror, Lothar suddenly buried has head in his arms, shuddering violently.... “That I were dead! that I were dead!” he moaned.