To amuse the secret loneliness which often became a boring acid he formed, with Jenesco, that hollow melee known as a debating club; called it “The Questioners”--prodded by a ghost of humor--and exhibited his words in the formal vaudeville-show. The performances occurred at the studio of a man named Fyodor Murovitch, a young Polish sculptor with a softly melodramatic abundance of dark brown hair and the face of a strangely waspish saint--a saint who was tempting himself with malices in order to conquer them. One evening Carl sat in this place, drained by the empty ritual of responding to noisy and firmly convinced people and ogling his nerves with the rhythm of pipe smoke. He looked up and saw a woman--Olga Ramely--standing beside him. His eyes experimented with the eyes of this stranger and suddenly contracted. Her eyes seemed to be two drops of quivering sweat left behind by an emotional crucifixion. They were sensitive with essences. Greyish-green, larger than a dwindled sky, lost in a perilous dream of wakefulness, holding the phantom glow of incredible tortures, friendly to mental recklessness, they were like a ludicrously clever imitation of his own eyes and he trembled in the presence of an inexplicable deception. His imagination was becoming a detached devil much in need of correction. Olga Ramely spoke to him. “I’ve been watching you all evening. The light from the candles over your head fell upon your yellow hair and put shadows on your face. The shadows gave your face a soft excuse and you looked half like a sprite and half like a martyr. There was an indelicately impish weariness on your face. Your hair was like light, and in one glistening attempt it tried to reach the weariness, but couldn’t. I told myself that you were not the man that people say you are.” He made his peace with her eyes, moved by a profound embarrassment, and discovered the rest of her face, with an abject and yet faintly skeptical desire. The surface flattery of her words had been almost without meaning to him, but her voice had given him a problem--deep with an alto scheme, like a trailing memory of pain, and quivering rebelliously under the disciplines of thought. He examined her face for an affirmation of the voice. Short, dark brown curls encumbered her head, like a wig of lost thoughts undulating in an effort to capture reality, and her skin was the smoothly troubled fusion of white and brown. Her nose was of moderate length and curved slightly outward, in a subdued question of flesh; her lips were small and thin--pliant devices of doubt--and a tight survival of plumpness upon her face told of a lucidly cherubic effect that had existed before life dropped its hands heavily upon her. Her body, verging on tallness, was immersed in a last skirmish with youth. “What have you heard them say about me?” he asked, craving the evasion of words that would conceal a unique tumult within him.