"Goodness knows. She wanted to wait till you were brought low."
"But I wasn't brought low. Never. I kept my pride and sent her about her business. What do you say to that?"
Johannes said nothing.
"But perhaps you're right," said the old Tutor. "Yes, by God and all his angels, what you say is right," he exclaimed with sudden excitement and took another drink. "She took an old captain at last; she nurses him, cuts up his food for him and is master of the house. A captain in the artillery."
Johannes looked up. Victoria sat with her glass in her hand staring in his direction. She held her glass high in the air. He felt a shock all through him and seized his glass too. His hand shook.
Then she called aloud to his neighbour and laughed; it was the Tutor's name she called.
Johannes put down his glass in humiliation and sat with an embarrassed smile on his face. Everybody had looked at him.
The old Tutor was touched to tears by this friendly attention of his pupil's. He made haste to empty his glass.
"And here I am, an old man," he continued, "here I am tramping the earth, alone and unknown. That has been my lot. Nobody knows what there is in me; but nobody has ever heard me grumble. How is that?—do you know the turtledove? Isn't it the turtledove, that melancholy being which makes the gay, bright spring water muddy before it drinks it?"
"I don't know."