“You’re unjust,” she replied and smiled. “Every woman has some field in which she has character and firmness, but the world pays no attention. Then, too, our relation to the world is usually a false one.”
“That is a wise remark,” said Lorm in a satisfied voice. He was a miser of praise.
From now on he loved to have her draw him into talk concerning his little needs and worries. She examined him in detail, and he was glad to submit. He brought her the bills rendered him by his tradespeople. “They capitalize your inexperience, and cheat you,” was Judith’s judgment of the situation. It made him feel ashamed.
“Have you been lending money?” she asked. It appeared that he had. For years and years he had loaned considerable sums to numerous parasites. Judith shrugged her shoulders. “You might just as well have thrown the money away.”
Lorm answered: “It’s such a bother when they come and beg, and their faces are so unappetizing. I give them what they ask just to be rid of them.”
In this wise their conversations moved wholly within the circle of the prosaic things of daily life. But it was precisely this that Edgar Lorm had missed and needed. It was as new and as moving to him, as the discovery of a rapt and ecstatic soul to a bourgeois becoming aware of poetry and passion.
Judith had a dream. She lay quite naked beside a slippery, icy fish. And she lay with it from choice, and snuggled close to its cold body. But suddenly she began to beat it, for its cool, damp, slippery scales, which had a gleam of silver and were opaline along its back, suddenly inspired in her a witch-like fury. She beat and beat the creature, until she lost consciousness and awoke exhausted.
An excursion into the valley of the Isar was arranged. Crammon went, and Felix, a young friend of the latter, Lorm and Judith. They took their coffee in the garden of an inn, and on the way back, which led through woods, they went in couples, Lorm and Judith being the last. “I’ve lost my gold cigarette case,” Lorm announced suddenly, examining his pocket, “I’ve got to go back the last part of the way. I know I had it when we were in the village.” It was an object precious in itself, and to which he attached a great value because it had been given him by a king who had been devoted to him in an enthusiastic friendship in his youth, and so it was irreplaceable.
Judith nodded. “I’ll wait here,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m too tired to cover the distance three times.”