"Never mind that now!"
"Well, I was standing there, looking in, longer perhaps than I knew. I felt that some one was beside me, but I didn't see who it was, till I heard a man's voice say: 'SCHONE SACHEN, FRAULEIN, WAS?' Of course, I took no notice; but I didn't run away, as if I were afraid of him. I went on looking into the window, till he said: 'DARF ICH IHNEN ETWASS KAUFEN?'and more nonsense of the same kind. Then I thought it was time to go. He followed me down the PETERSTRASSE, and when I came to the ROSSPLATZ, he was still behind me. So I determined to lead him a dance. I've been walking about, with him at my heels, for over an hour. In a quiet street where there was no one in sight, he spoke to me again, and refused to go away until I told him where I lived. I pretended to agree, and, on the condition that he didn't follow me any further, I gave him a number in the QUERSTRASSE; and in case he broke his. word, I came home that way. I hope he'll spend a pleasant evening looking for me."
She laughed—her fitful, somewhat unreal laugh, which was always displeasing to him. To-night, taken in conjunction with her story, and her unconcerned way of telling it, it jarred on him as never before.
"Let me catch him here, and I'll make it impossible for him to insult a woman again!" he cried. "For it is an insult though you don't see it in that light. You laugh as you tell it, as if something amusing had happened to you. You are so strange sometimes.—Tell me, dearest, WHY did you go out? When I asked you, you wouldn't come."
"No. Then I wasn't in the mood." Her smile faded.
"No. But after dark—and quite alone—then the mood takes you."
"But I've done it hundreds of times before. I can take care of myself."
"You are never to do it again—do you hear?—Why didn't you give the fellow in charge?" he asked a moment later, in a burst of distrust.
Again Louise laughed. "Oh, a German policeman would find that rather funny than otherwise. It's the rule, you know, not the exception. And the same thing has happened to me before. So often that it's literally not worth mentioning. I shouldn't have spoken of it to-night if you hadn't been so persistent. Besides," she added as an afterthought—and, in the face of his grave displeasure, she found herself wilfully exaggerating the levity of her tone—"besides, this wasn't the kind of man one gives in charge. Not the usual commercial-traveller type. A Graf, or Baron, at least."
He was as nettled as she had intended him to be. "You talk just as if you had had experience in the class of man.—Do you really think it makes things any better? To my mind, it's a great deal worse.—But the thing is—you don't know how ... You're not to go out alone again at night. I forbid it. This is the first time for weeks; and see what happens! And it's not you may well say it has happened to you before. I don't know what it is, but—The very cab-drivers look at you as they've no business to—as they don't look at other women!"