He accepted the condition as final, and said submissively, "Just as you like, comrade."
Now was her chance to speak out. She drew a deep breath and said:
"You know I want to talk seriously to you, Herr von Prell."
"Ugh!" he ejaculated, prepared for a bad quarter of an hour, as he gnawed his gloved thumbs.
Lilly plunged off at a tangent. She would not say anything about his last misdemeanour, for bad as it was, it was all over, and what was forgiven ought also to be forgotten. But if he imagined that the loose life he had been leading was a secret in the castle household, he was very much mistaken. It was an open scandal, and even the laundry and scullery-maids sniggered about it; but how could he expect anything else after ... Here she enumerated the sum total of his misdoings, as she had gleaned them from remarks the servants had let fall.
She was ashamed to retail them. This was not what she had intended to say at all.... She had wanted to speak grandly of the high purpose of human existence, the nobility of self-renunciation, the glory of pure and lofty ideals, of the spiritual tie uniting the elect on earth, and so on. But inspiration failed her when she saw him sitting there with bent shoulders and turning his big toes inwards so that under the soft leather of his riding-boots they looked like excrescences, and she could think of nothing better.
He did not interrupt her. Even when she had done he was silent, absorbed in watching an insect wriggling in circles on the surface of the water.
"Have you no answer," she asked, "after all the disgraceful things I have accused you of?"
"What should I answer, most learned judge?" he retorted. "My one claim to distinction is that I am absolutely devoid of moral sense. Do you want me to lose it?"
"If you are so weak and have no reliance on yourself," she exclaimed in growing zeal, "let me be your mainstay and support. Lean on me, your friend, adviser, your----"