But he did.
"I should like to have you try, first of all, Toni, to live there. It isn't easy. But we can both stand a good deal, thank God, and if we don't like it in the end, why, we can move away."
And he said that so simply and sincerely that her suspicion vanished.
And with this returning certitude there returned, too, the ambition which she had always nurtured for him.
"How would it be if we moved to Berlin, or somewhere where there is a university?"
"And maybe aim at a professorship?" he cried with cheerful irony. "No, Tonichen, all your money can't persuade me to that. I crammed enough in that damned medical school, I've got my income and that's good enough for me."
A feeling of disgust came over her. She seemed to perceive the stuffy odour of unventilated rooms and of decaying water in which flowers had stood.
"That is what I suffered for," involuntarily the thought came, "that!"
After dinner when Amanda was sleeping off the effects of the little sip of wine which she had taken when they let her clink glasses with them, they sat opposite each other beside the geraniums of the window-box and fell silent. He blew clouds of smoke from his cigar into the air and seemed not disinclined to indulge in a nap, too.
Leaning back in her wicker chair she observed him uninterruptedly. At one moment it seemed to her as though she caught an intoxicating remnant of the slim, pallid lad to whom she had given her love. And then again came the corroding doubt: "Was it for him, for him…." And then a great fear oppressed her heart, because this man seemed to live in a world which she could not reach in a whole life's pilgrimage. Walls had arisen between them, doors had been bolted—doors that rose from the depths of the earth to the heights of heaven…. As he sat there, surrounded by the blue smoke of his cigar, he seemed more and more to recede into immeasurable distances….