Such a spring now dawned for Lilly. Everything seemed to wear a new face. The early sunshine had never before cut such grotesque little capers on the wall, never had there been such ravishing violet twilights at the end of rainy days, never had people worn such hopeful festive looks as they passed her, never had the din of street traffic sounded so full of an infectious revelling in activity.
Yes, and all at once she too found no end of things to do. Every hour was full of delightful and urgent engagements. If anyone had told her during the last few years that she would ever again, with burning cheeks and a feverish brain, get up dates, quotations, historical allusions, and foreign words, she would have laughed at them.
But now, whatever she did, she must not idle. As that time she had been ready with her answer about Giotto, so she must always have a response on the tip of her tongue when it was expected of her. All her eagerness to learn, which had been quenched in her for years by a feeling of isolation and uselessness, now streamed forth anew. And her mind--like a starved and uncultivated pasture--absorbed everything it was offered with an insatiable maw. It demanded hardly an effort to commit things to memory; she had only to imagine that she was quoting to him, and lines remained with her.
She managed it all with the utmost secrecy, for Konrad--yes, that was his name, Konrad; he was called Konrad--must not suspect that her knowledge was brand-new and fresh from the mint. She sneaked alone to the museums and picture galleries because she wanted him to think she had been at home in them from time immemorial. Then she practised up several pieces of old music that might be of use to him in his work. And often did she bless her father's rigid discipline, which had kept her at the piano till late in the night.
They saw a great deal of each other. He came every other evening as a regular thing. He avoided the afternoons, knowing that they were devoted to the friend of her fiancé, but often in the middle of the day he bounded up the stairs with a book or a flower, and begged for a little music. He never would stay to lunch, however warmly she pressed him. For the most part he was not at his ease in her flat; he would walk up and down restlessly, look at his watch and then hurry off. At first she was hurt, and asked him teasingly if he thought he was in the enemy's country when he came to see her. But, of course, she did not yet thoroughly understand him. Every day revealed some new and unusual trait in his character.
He was still extremely young, not only in years. She had known many callous, blasé old men of twenty-five--which was his age. His youth was within him. His thoughts were young and passionate, and she had never met anyone who expended so much care on mere thinking. His ideas seemed to be to him tangible beings, with whom he had to come to grips and either hug to his heart or spurn with his foot. Friends or enemies to him were all the great thinkers and creators of other times. He associated with them as with masters and comrades; defied them or despised them; submitted reverently to their teaching, or made fun of them.
His thought and his conversation were a perpetual flow of antitheses and a whirl of paradoxes, a forcible pushing forward of research, a ruthless sport. He could not be neutral or indifferent. He saw in everything problems that cried out for solution, questions of urgency in which it was necessary to take sides. He loved or he hated; there was no middle course for him.
She followed him and hung on his lips, with all the fervour of a disciple and lover. She annexed his ideas, and let them take root or die off in her mind as chance willed it. She had such riches to choose from that one more or less did not matter.
Of his personal affairs he talked very little. Not because he was reserved or lacking in confidence, but because he deemed them of no importance or interest. Lilly had to drag everything out of him, bit by bit.
The image of his parents had faded with time, though he still cherished an enthusiastic regard for their memory. For him his uncle had stood in the place of parents, the rich parvenu and man of the world, whose heir he would ultimately be, and to whom he now owed his freedom from sordid cares about money.