Reineke paced the room awhile in silence, keenly observed by his companion, and sat down to stare idly out of the window. Phrases of Inarime’s letter to Miss Winter recurred to him like buoyant messages.
“You will be here for some time?” Constantine asked.
“As long as you like—as long as you bid me hope.”
“That is well. You are a distinguished personage, Herr Reineke, and it will not be difficult to find you.” Then in a lighter tone, dismissing the graver personal matter, he broke into town gossip.
“I have just met that impertinent young man Agiropoulos. You heard, I suppose, he is going to marry that little heroine, the Karapolos girl?”
“How should I? But it is well. A woman is all the better for being hedged round with the conventionalities of life; and in no case are they so powerfully protecting as when they chain her by marriage, when, practically speaking, she ceases to be a responsible agent,” Reineke said, and added as an afterthought, to exclude Inarime from the slightly contemptuous classification, “that is, the average woman, that unexplained engine of impulse and unreason.”
“Poor little creature! She was hard hit. I wonder what has become of her recreant lover.”
“Young Ehrenstein?”
“Yes. He levanted, you know, with that piano-playing woman, the Natzelhuber.”