Hanno’s and Kai’s conversation was in striking contrast to that which went on around them among their fellows. This friendship had been recognized in the school for a long time. The masters suffered it grudgingly, suspecting that it meant disaffection and future trouble. The pupils could not understand it, but had settled down to regarding it with a sort of embarrassed dislike, and to thinking of the two friends as outlaws and eccentrics who must be left to their own devices. They recognized, it is true, the wildness and insubordination of Kai, Count Mölln, and respected him accordingly. As for Hanno Buddenbrook, big Heinricy, who thrashed everybody, could not make up his mind to lay a finger on him by way of chastisement for dandyism or cowardice. He refrained out of an indefinite respect and awe for the softness of Hanno’s hair, the delicacy of his limbs, and his sad, shy, cold glance. “I’m scared,” Hanno said to Kai. He leaned against the wall of the school, drawing his jacket closer about him, yawning and shivering, “I’m so scared, Kai, that it hurts me all over my body. Now just tell me this: is Herr Mantelsack the sort of person one ought to be afraid of? Tell me yourself! If this beastly Ovid lesson were only over! If I just had my bad mark, in peace, and stopped where I am, and everything was in order! I’m not afraid of that. It is the row that goes beforehand that I hate!” Kai was still deep in thought. “This Roderick Usher is the most remarkable character ever conceived,” he said suddenly and abruptly. “I have read the whole lesson-hour. If ever I could write a tale like that!” Kai was absorbed in his writing. It was to this he had referred when he said that he had something better to do than his preparation, and Hanno had understood him. Attempts at composition had developed out of his old propensity for inventing tales; and he had lately completed a composition in the form of a fantastic fairy tale, a narrative of symbolic adventure, which went forward in the depths of the earth among glowing metals and mysterious fires, and at the same time in the souls of men: a tale in which the primeval forces of nature and of the soul were interchanged and mingled, transformed and refined--the whole conceived and written in a vein of extravagant and even sentimental symbolism, fervid with passion and longing. Hanno knew the tale well, and loved it; but he was not now in a frame of mind to think of Kai’s work or of Edgar Allan Poe. He yawned again, and then sighed, humming to himself a _motif_ he had lately composed on the piano. This was a habit with him. He would often give a long sigh, a deep indrawn breath, from the instinct to calm the fluctuating and irregular action of his heart; and he had accustomed himself to set the deep breathing to a musical theme of his own or some one else’s invention. “Look, there comes the Lord God,” said Kai. “He is walking in his garden.”