[Holds out her hand. BOLZ bends low over it.]
ADELAIDE (in joyous emotion). I knew you at once from a distance. Let me see your faithful face. Yes, it has changed but little—a scar, browner, and a small line about the mouth. I hope it is from laughing.
BOLZ. If at this moment I feel like anything but laughing it is only a passing malignity of soul. I see myself double, like a melancholy Highlander. In your presence my long happy childhood passes bodily before my eyes. All the joy and pain it brought me I feel as vividly again as though I were still the boy who went into the wood for you in search of wild adventures and caught robin-red-breasts. And yet the fine creature I see before me is so different from my playmate that I realize I am only dreaming a beautiful dream. Your eyes shine as kindly as ever, but—(Bowing.) I have scarcely the right still to think of old dreams.
ADELAIDE. Possibly I, too, am not so changed as you think; and changed though we both be, we have remained good friends, have we not?
BOLZ. Rather than give up one iota of my claim to your regard, I would write and print and try to sell malicious articles against myself.
ADELAIDE. And yet you have been too proud all this time even to come and see your friend in town. Why have you broken with the Colonel?
BOLZ. I have not broken with him. On the contrary, I have a very estimable position in his house—one that I can best keep by going there as seldom as possible. The Colonel, and occasionally Miss Ida, too, like to assuage their anger against Oldendorf and the newspaper by regarding me as the evil one with horns and hoofs. A relationship so tender must be handled with care—a devil must not cheapen himself by appearing every day.
ADELAIDE. Well, I hope you will now abandon this lofty viewpoint. I am spending the winter in town, and I hope that for love of your boyhood's friend you will call on my friends as a denizen of this world.
BOLZ. In any role you apportion me.
ADELAIDE. Even in that of a peace-envoy between the Colonel and
Oldendorf?