A man appeared one day in the Berne who had known Kreisler in Münich. The story of Kreisler’s marrying his fiancée to his father then became known. Other complications were alleged in which Otto’s paternity played a part. The dot of the bride was another obscure matter. It was during his aloofness. He looked the sort of man, the party agreed, who would splice his sweetheart with his papa or reinforce his papa’s affairs with a dot he did not wish to pay for at last with his own person. The Berne was also informed that Kreisler had to keep seventeen children in Münich alone; that he only had to look at a woman for her to become pregnant. It was when the head of the column, the eldest of the seventeen, emerged into boyhood, requiring instruction, that Kreisler left for Rome. Since then a small society had been founded in Bavaria to care for Kreisler’s offsprings throughout Germany. This great capacity of Otto’s was, naturally, not admired; at the best it could be considered as a misdirected and disordered efficiency. The stories pleased, nevertheless. When he appeared that night his friends turned towards his historic figure with cries of welcome. But he was not gregarious. He missed his opportunity. He took a seat in the passage-way leading to the Bureau de Tabac. As their laughter struck him through his paper he was unstrung enough to be annoyed. He frowned and puckered up his eyes, and two flushed lines descended from his eyes to his jaw. On their way out one or two of his compatriots greeted him: “Sacred Otto! Why so unsociable?” “Hush! He has much to think about. You don’t understand what the cares of—” “Come, old Otto, a drink!” He shook them off with mixture of affected anger and genuine spitting oaths. He avoided their eyes and spat blasphemously at his beer. He avoided the café for some days. Kreisler then recovered. At first nothing much happened. He had just gone back again into the midst of his machinery like a bone slipped into its place, with a soft crick. He became rather more firm with his creditors. He changed his rooms (moving then to the Boulevard Pfeiffer), passed an occasional evening with the Germans at the Berne, and started a portrait of Suzanne, who had been sitting at the school. “How is Herr Volker? Is he out of Paris?” Fräulein Lipmann asked him when they met. “Come round and see us.” People’s actual or possible proceedings formed in very hard-and-fast mould in Kreisler’s mind, seen not with realism, but through conventions of his suspicious irony. This solicitude as to Volker he contrasted with their probable indifference as regards his old, shabby, and impolite self.