Who had said that?
Why, to be sure, her first flame--that poor consumptive lecturer on the history of art, whom she and Rosalie Katz had clubbed together to send to the promised land, the land which she herself had never seen. He had spoken of the blue haze of the olives, of fields of shining asphodel, and the black sirocco sea.
"Fields of shining asphodel." What sort of fields could they be, fields of asphodel?
The foreign word sounded strange, and oh, how full of enchantment! But her heels still went tap-tap, and the cradle-song of the palisade thundered in between.
A man addressed her: "Would she ...?"
She shook him off as if he had been a reptile.
Then she remembered another warning that had been given her, also divided into three heads--whose was that? Oh, now she recollected: Dr. Pieper's. It came back to her, every word and sentence of the pompous utterance sounding in her ears as clearly as if it had been spoken only yesterday, "There are three things to beware of: Exchange no superfluous glances; demand no superfluous rendering of accounts; make no superfluous confessions."
"If I had not exchanged superfluous glances I should have seen my promised land. If I had not superfluously demanded a rendering of account, I should never have been kicked out of Lischnitz. And if I had not made superfluous confessions...."
Well, what then?
"Konni! Konni!" she wailed. A shudder of yearning overwhelmed her painfully, and restrained her wandering thoughts.