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The lady was called to account for her protegee. She refused to speak. "It's all the fault of those accursed Indian lilies," Niebeldingk grumbled one afternoon at his window as he watched the knight of various honourable orders parade the street as undaunted as ever. "Had I treated her with less delicacy, she would never have risked playing the part of an innocent victim."
And nothing would be more shameful than if society were already to begin to make a featureless model boy of him." "That will never be, I swear to you, dear lady," cried Fritz all aglow and stretching out his hands to ward off imaginary chains. Niebeldingk smiled and thought: "So much the better for him." Then he lit a fresh cigarette. The conversation turned to learned things.
And when my sister gets on the track of anything, well!" ... He shook with pleasure at the sly blow he had thus delivered, drew those funereal gloves of his from the crown of his hat and took his leave. "So it was the fault of the Indian lilies," Niebeldingk thought, looking after the queer old knight with an amused imprecation.
Niebeldingk who had waited behind his curtain, half-amused, half-bored for in the silent, distinguished street where everyone knew him a scandal was to be avoided at any cost Niebeldingk hastened to make up for his neglect at once. The dark fell. Here and there the street-lamps flickered through the purple air of the summer dusk....
"Permit me, my dear sir," he said, "but you misunderstand me entirely.... Even if I do help my sister in the house, and even if I do go on errands, I would never have consented to go on such an one.... I said to my sister: It's marriage or nothing.... We don't go in for blackmail, of that you may be sure." "Well, my dear man," Niebeldingk laughed, "If that's the alternative, then nothing!"
"All that was to be swept out.... How forgetful one can be...." Smiling, she leaned her head against his shoulder and was not to be persuaded from her silence. "There are delicate boundaries within the realm of the eternal womanly," thus Niebeldingk reflected next day, "in which one is sorely puzzled as to what one had better put into an envelope: a poem or a cheque."
He laughed slyly as one who is getting even with an old enemy and drank, with every evidence of delight, the second glassful of wine. Niebeldingk considered. Whether unfathomable stupidity or equally unfathomable sophistication lay at the bottom of all this the business was a wretched one.
Fritz, paraphrasing Tacitus, vented his hatred of the Latin civilisations. Alice agreed with him and quoted Mme. de Stael. Niebeldingk arose, quietly meeting the reproachful glance of his beloved. Fritz jumped up simultaneously, but Niebeldingk laughingly pushed him back into his seat. "You just stay," he said, "our dear friend is only too eager to slaughter a few more peoples."
Around the hour of afternoon tea Niebeldingk, true to a dear, old habit, went to see his friend. She inhabited a small second-floor apartment in the Regentenstrasse which he had himself selected for her when she came as a stranger to Berlin. With flowers and palms and oriental rugs she had moulded a delicious retreat, and before her bed-room windows the nightingales sang in the springtime.
"Well then," Niebeldingk exclaimed, overcome with astonishment, "if that's the case, what are you after?" "I?" the old gentleman quavered and pointed a funereal glove at his breast, "I? Oh, dear sakes alive! I'm not after anything. Do you imagine, my dear sir, that I get any fun out of tramping up and down in front of your house on my old legs?
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