"Well, by all means let us put matters straight," she answered, with the patronising smile that such a farce merited.
"I shouldn't be surprised," she thought, "if he were not waiting outside in the cab for a signal to come in."
"Uncle" placed his smart panama hat beside him on the floor, leaned his short body back in Frau Laue's red plush arm-chair, and affected an expression of distress and sympathy.
What an old clown he was! It mystified her more than anything that he seemed so absolutely to have forgotten the alliance they had entered into on the previous evening. But perhaps this was only part of the probation farce.
"If it were only a question of me, my dear," he went on, "it wouldn't matter. I honestly confess I'm mad about you--'wrapped up,' as I said last night. I have met womenfolk in all parts of the globe, and it's as clear to me as palm-oil that you are made of the choicest materials it's possible to find. But there are people, you know, who take life seriously and cherish grand illusions.... people who have no notion that a human being must be a human being. They think they are something extra, and expect life to afford them extra titbits. And then come disappointments, of course ... reproaches, despair ... tearing of hair, wringing of hands. I'm blowed if he didn't try to thrash me last night!"
"Whom are you talking about?" asked Lilly, becoming every moment more uneasy.
"Just as if I had led you on into the little overshooting of the mark! No, no ... that's not my way. I don't lay man-traps. And so I told him ten times over. The misfortune is, that you and I understood each other too well. You and I are in the same line of business.... We two are like two old colleagues."
"We two ...? You and I?" gasped Lilly in frigid amazement.
"Yes, you and I, my dear child. Don't have a fit--you and I; you and I. It's true that you are a splendid beauty of twenty-five, and I am a damned old fool of sixty.... But life has tarred us with the same brush. How am I to explain it to you?... Have you ever hunted for diamonds? I don't mean at the jeweller's. I'll lay a wager you know that way of hunting them. Well, a diamond lies embedded in hard rock, in tunnels ... so-called blue ground. If you find a blue-ground tunnel, you may imagine what it is; you just sit in it. Once I went diamond-hunting with a party of twenty, day and night, week after week. The blue ground was there all right, but the diamonds had been washed out of it. Do you follow me? The fine ground is still in both of us; but what made it fine the devil has in the meantime walked off with."
"Why do you tell me all this?" Lilly asked. Tears of bewilderment sprang to her eyes, for this couldn't possibly have anything to do with the probation.