“Oh, well, bromine is calming and calcium is stimulating,” Letitia chattered, quite at random, hesitated, stopped, and broke into her charming laughter. Crammon, like a school-teacher, tried for a while to preserve his dignity, but finally joined in her laughter. He threw himself into a deep armchair, drew up a little table on which was a bowl of fruit and little golden knives, and began to peel an apple. Letitia, sitting opposite him with a closed book in her hand, watched him with delicate and cunning attention. His graceful gestures pleased her. The contrast he afforded between plumpness and grace of movement always delighted her.
“I am told that you’re flirting with Count Egon Rochlitz,” Crammon said, while he ate his apple with massive zest. “I should like to sound a warning. The man is a notorious and indiscriminate Don Juan; all he requires is hips and a bosom. Furthermore, he is up to the eyes in debt; the only hope of his creditors is that he makes a rich marriage. Finally, he is a widower and the father of three small girls. Now you are informed.”
“It’s awfully nice and kind of you to tell me,” Letitia replied. “But if I like the man, why should your moral scruples keep me from continuing to like him? Nearly all men chase after women; all men have debts; very few have three little daughters, and I think that’s charming. He is clever, cultivated, and distinguished, and has the nicest voice. A man who has an agreeable voice can’t be quite bad. But I’m not proposing to marry him. Surely you’re not such a bad, stubborn old stepfather that you think I mean to marry every man who ... who, well, who has an agreeable voice? Or are you afraid, you wicked miser, that I’ll try to extract a dowry from you? I’m sure that’s the cause of your very bad humour. Come, Bernard, confess! Isn’t it so?”
Smiling she stood in front of him with a jesting motion of command. She touched his forehead with the index-finger of one hand; the other she raised half threateningly, half solemnly.
Crammon said: “Child, you are once more omitting the respect due me. Consider my whitening locks, my years and experience. Be humble and learn of me, and don’t mock at your venerable progenitor. My humour? Well, it isn’t the best in the world, I admit. Ah, it was better once. You seem not to know that somewhere in this city, far beyond our haunts, in its slums and morasses, there lives one who was dear to me above all men—Christian Wahnschaffe. You too, in some hoary antiquity, threw out your line after him. Do you remember? Ah, how long ago that is! That would have been a catch. And I, ass that I was, opposed that charming, little intrigue. Perhaps everything might have turned out differently. But complaint is futile. Everything is over between us. There is no path for me to where he is; and yet my soul is driven and goaded toward him, and while I sit here in decent comfort, I feel as though I were committing a scoundrelly action.”
Letitia had opened her eyes very wide while he spoke. It was the first time since the days at Wahnschaffe Castle that any one had spoken to her of Christian. His image arose, and she felt within her breast the faint beating of the wings of dread. There was a sweetness in that feeling and a poignancy.... One had to be as capable of forgetting as she was, in order to be able to recapture for a moment, in the deep chiming of a memoried hour, the keen emotion of a long ago.
She questioned him. At first he answered reluctantly, sentence by sentence; then, urged on by her impatience, his narrative flowed on. The utter astonishment of Letitia flattered him; he painted his picture in violent colours. Her delicate face mirrored the fleeting emotions of her soul. In her responsive imagination and vibrant heart everything assumed concreteness and immediate vividness. She needed no interpretations; they were all within her. She gazed into that unknown darkness full of presage and full of understanding. In truth, it all seemed familiar to her, familiar like a poem, as though she had lived with Christian all that time, and she knew more than Crammon could tell her, infinitely more, for she grasped the whole, its idea and form, its fatefulness and pain. She glowed and cried: “I must go to him.” But picturing that meeting, she grew frightened, and imagined a rapt look she would use, and Crammon’s lack of intensity annoyed her, and his whine of complaint seemed senseless to her.
“I always felt,” she said, with gleaming eyes, “that there was a hidden power in him. Whenever I had wicked little thoughts and he looked at me, I grew ashamed. He could read thoughts even then, but he did not know it.”
“I have heard you say cleverer things than you are doing now,” Crammon said, mockingly. But her enthusiasm moved him, and there welled up in him a jealousy of all the men who stretched out their hands after her.
“I shall go to him,” she said, smiling, “and ease my heart in his presence.”