Hours devoted to amorous dalliance were out of the question. Often indeed he fell asleep in a corner of the sofa in the middle of his work. Then Lilly could contemplate at her leisure the ravages his strenuous life had made on him. He looked haggard and worn, his clothes were neglected, and the velvety blue sheen of his cheeks, in which she had taken such delight, had given place to pimples and a stubbly growth of hair.
She would have given anything to know what he was really thinking about her at the bottom of his soul, but she could extract nothing from him. Dumbly he gazed before him with burning eyes, his lips so tightly compressed that the edge of a razor could not have been inserted between them. She had no grounds for doubting him, for she knew that all his energies were concentrated on preparing for their joint future.
The post of professor of German in a college in Buenos Ayres was vacant, also a similar post in Caracas, and on the other side of the herring-pond he could easily get employment on any university staff. All that was necessary was a few testimonials from celebrated professors.
It was only in the contingency of his uncle disapproving of his marriage and cutting him off that he laid these plans. If the old man said "Yes," there would be ample means to set up housekeeping anywhere they liked, and in surroundings most congenial for the precious work.
Konrad had at once announced his engagement to his uncle, and given a heart-moving account of Lilly's past. He did not conceal that there had been stains on it, but he emphasised the more her fine qualities, her inner purity, her grandeur of soul, her gifts of mind, the wealth of her intellectual interests.
He read her an extract from a copy of the letter after he had despatched it, sounding like the manifesto of a social revolution:
"I know you are, thank God, as I am, far above the narrow Philistine conventions of society, the uncharitable social standards, the Pharisaism that entitles itself to be the guardian of public morals and would sacrifice all aspirations, freedom of conduct, and high living to the fetish of family-life bondage. You have travelled in all parts of the world and learned how mutable are the laws of morality everywhere, how hollow the sham of pretending to regard each as the divinely ordained dogma, and how hypocritical the sly methods by which men wriggle out of them. You know that in the realm of ethics there is one thing alone that commands unconditionally a reverence and esteem, and that is the will to kallokagathia, to that mode of living in which the super-men of all times combined the Good and Beautiful. Yes, in her aspirations and her troubles, she has personified the good and beautiful for me, and has brought into my life imperial rights and the dawn of morning's glory."
Could anything be more splendidly and touchingly put? Who could be so crassly dull and stupid as to resist the power of such language? And with this she consoled him when he was weighed down with a feeling of depression about the uncertainty of their immediate future.
A week passed before the answer came, the longed-for answer that meant joy or despair to two human beings.
"My dear Boy,