At the same time he had very little to say about his own personal experiences. She could not find out whether he was still a student; he would only confess that his deepest feelings had been hurt irreparably in the grim fight for existence. And while he talked and laughed stridently, two semicircular dents appeared in his lean cheeks, giving his face a hard, sarcastic expression. Lilly had a dim remembrance that of old these marks had been visible on his youthful countenance, though less accentuated.
"Oh, poor, poor fellow!" she thought compassionately, and resolved on the instant to make a man of him again, inwardly and outwardly. But when he was gone she felt very sad and depressed. "Am I much better off?" she asked herself. "What has become of the joyous confidence in life that I once had? Where is my joy of life, where my Song of Songs?"
That afternoon, before Richard came, she evolved a scheme by which she could bestow a new wardrobe on Fritz Redlich, without drawing on Richard's purse or offending Fritz Redlich.
"What do you think?" she said to him after tea. "Since yesterday two rather extraordinary things have happened--one a very nice thing, and the other a very sad thing. First, I have met an old friend of mine, who before he went to the university lived on the same floor as I did. And then this morning a poor student called and begged for something to eat. He looked so miserable! Have you, in case he calls again, any clothes to give away? Suits and boots--he wants everything."
"I'll give you some with pleasure," said Richard. "I don't know what to do with all my left-off stuff." But the other, the "old friend," made him thoughtful. "What sort of a chap is he?" he asked.
In her effort to keep distinct the two mythical beings that she had made out of one living reality, she began to sing the old friend's praises with far too much exaggeration to be judicious. He was an extremely clever and quite distinguished young professor, who had completed his university course and was just entering on a brilliant career, a paragon of knowledge and intellect, and goodness knew what else.
"What was his special subject?"
She really didn't know, only that it was something very profound and erudite. Nothing but an academic career was worthy of his talents.
She found herself immersed in such a whirlpool of lies that at last she did not know what she was saying.