Things are not quite so bad for the actor. He has staked nothing, is committed to nothing. No part of his life is destroyed, nor anything within him. As he came, so he goes, cheerful, empty, nice. In fact he is even something more of a man because he has really made a conquest. He has no wish but to spend some pleasant hours with the Torsen type. He strolled about the garden waiting for her to get ready. Once she was visible through the doorway, and he called to her: "Aren't you coming soon? Don't forget we've got to cross the mountain!" "Well, I can't go bareheaded," she replied. He was impatient. "No, you've got to put your hat on, and what a lot of time that takes! Ugh!" She measured him coldly and said: "You're very--familiar." If he had paid her back in the same coin there would have been weeping and gnashing of teeth and cries of "Go away! Go alone!" and an hour's delay, and reconciliation and embraces. But the actor's manner changed at once, and he replied docilely, as his nature was, "Familiar? Well--perhaps. Sorry!" Then he strolled about the garden again, humming occasionally and swinging his stick. I took note of the oddly feminine shape of his knees, and the unusual plumpness of his thighs; there was something unnatural about this plumpness, as though it did not belong to his sex. His shoes were down at the heel, and his collar was open. His raincoat hung regally from his shoulders and flapped in the wind, though it was not raining. He was a proud and comical sight. But why speak harsh words about a raincoat? It was not he, the owner, that had abused it, and it hung from his shoulders as innocently as a bridal veil. Why speak harsh words about anyone? Life is good, but life is stern. Perhaps when she comes out, I think to myself, the following scene will take place: I stand here waiting only for this departure. So she gives me her hand and says good-bye. "Why don't you say something?" she asks in order to seem bright and easy in her mind. "Because I don't want to hurt you in the great error of your ways." "Ha, ha, ha," she laughs, too loudly and in a forced tone; "the great error of my ways! Well, really!" And her anger grows, while I am assured and fatherly, standing on the firm ground of conscious virtue. Yet I say an unworthy thing like this: "Don't throw yourself away, Miss Torsen!" She raises her head then; yes, the Torsen type would raise her head and reply, pale and offended: "Throw myself away?--I don't understand you." But it is possible, too, that Miss Torsen, at heart a fine, proud girl, would have a lucid moment and see things in their true light: "Why not, why shouldn't I throw myself away? What is there to keep? I am thrown away, wasted ever since my school days, and now I am seven and twenty...." My own thoughts run away with me as I stand there wishing I were somewhere else. Perhaps she, too, in her room wishes me far away.