She sought a starting point in vain. Crammon, outwardly smooth, but really in a malicious and woodenly stubborn mood, recognized her difficulty, but would do nothing to help her.
“Why do you stay at a hotel, Herr von Crammon?” she asked. “We have a right to you and it isn’t nice of you to neglect us.”
“Don’t grudge an old tramp his freedom, dear lady,” Crammon answered, “and anyhow it would give me a heartache to have to leave this magic castle after just a day.”
Frau Wahnschaffe nibbled at a biscuit. “Anything is better than a hotel,” she said. “It’s always a bit depressing, and not least so when it’s most luxurious. And it isn’t really nice. You are next door to quite unknown people. And the noises! But, after all, what distinction in life is there left to-day? It’s no longer in fashion.” She sighed. Now she thought she had found the conversational bridge she needed, and gave herself a jolt. “What do you think of Judith?” she said in a dull, even voice. “A lamentable mistake. I thought her marriage to Imhof far from appropriate and regretted it. But this! I can hardly look my acquaintances in the face. I always feared the child’s inordinate ambitions, her utter lack of restraint. Now she throws herself at the head of an actor. And to add to the painful complications, there is her bizarre renunciation of her fortune. Incomprehensible! There’s some secret behind that, Herr von Crammon. Does she realize clearly what it will mean to live on a more or less limited salary? It’s incomprehensible.”
“You need have no anxiety,” Crammon assured her. “Edgar Lorm has a princely income and is a great artist.”
“Ah, artists!” Frau Wahnschaffe interrupted him, with a touch of impatience and a contemptuous gesture. “That means little. One pays them; occasionally one pays them well. But they are uncertain people, always on the knife’s edge. It’s customary now to make a great deal of them, even in our circles. I’ve never understood that. Judith will have to pay terribly for her folly, and Wahnschaffe and I are suffering a bitter disappointment.” She sighed, and looked at Crammon surreptitiously before she asked with apparent indifference, “Did you hear from Christian recently?”
Crammon said that he had not.
“We have been without news of him for two months,” Frau Wahnschaffe added. Another shy glance at Crammon told her that he could not give her the information she sought. He was not sufficiently master of himself at this moment to conceal the cause of his long and secret sorrow.
A peacock proudly passed the balcony, spread the gleaming magnificence of his feathers in the sunlight, and uttered a repulsive cry.
“I’ve been told that he’s travelling with the son of the forester,” said Crammon, and pulled up his eyebrows so high that his face looked like the gargoyle of a mediæval devil. “Where he has gone to, I can only suppose; but I have no right to express such suppositions. I hope our paths will cross. We parted in perfect friendship. It is possible that we shall find each other again on the same basis.”