Like Grosse, he was not himself—he too behaved strangely! First, he was so cold and so silent, that I thought he was offended. Then he went straight to the other extreme, and became so loudly talkative, so obstreperously cheerful, that my aunt asked me privately whether I did not suspect (as she did) that he had been taking too much wine. It ended in his trying to sing to my accompaniment on the piano, and in his breaking down. He walked away to the other end of the room without explanation or apology. When I followed him there a little while after, he had a look that indescribably distressed me—a look as if he had been crying. Towards the end of the evening, my aunt fell asleep over her book, and gave us a chance of speaking to each other in a little second room which opens out of the drawing-room in this house. It was I who took the chance—not he. He was so incomprehensibly unwilling to go into the room and speak to me, that I had to do a very unladylike thing. I mean that I had to take his arm, and lead him in myself, and entreat him (in a whisper) to tell me what was the matter with him.
"Only the old complaint," he answered.
I made him sit down by me on a little couch that just held two.
"What do you mean by the old complaint?" I asked.
"Oh! you know!"
"I don't know."
"You would know if you really loved me."
"Oscar! it is a shame to say that. It is a shame to doubt that I love you!"
"Is it? Ever since I have been here, I have doubted that you love me. It is getting to be an old complaint of mine now. I still suffer a little sometimes. Don't notice it!"
He was so cruel and so unjust, that I got up to leave him, without saying a word more. But, oh! he looked so forlorn and so submissive—sitting with his head down, and his hands crossed listlessly over his knees—that I could not find it in my heart to treat him harshly. Was I wrong? I don't know! I have no idea how to manage men—and no Madame Pratolungo now to teach me. Right or wrong, it ended in my sitting down by him again in the place which I had just left.