Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog _to guide her_.—What had she meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that _must_ exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog!—only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter.—He would humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposal, not be exigent. It was a rôle difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this resolution brought about caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.—Every time he felt his retiring humbleness giving place to another sensation, he anew felt qualms. “Do you intend studying here, Fräulein?” he asked, with a new deference in his tone—hardly a canine whine, but deep servient bass of the faithful St. Bernard.—She seemed to have noticed this something new already, and Kreisler on all fours evidently astonished her. She was inclined to stroke him, but at the same time to ask what was the matter. “A year or two ago I escaped from a bourgeois household in an original manner. Shall I tell you about that, Otto?” Confidence for confidence, he had told Anastasya that he was Otto. “Please!” he said, with reverent eagerness. “Well, the bourgeois household was that of my father and mother.—I got out of it in this way.—I made myself such a nuisance to my family that they had to get rid of me.” Otto flung himself back in his chair with dramatic incredulity. “It was quite simple.—I began scribbling and scratching all over the place—on blotting-pads, margins of newspapers, on my father’s correspondence, the wall-paper. I inundated my home with troublesome images. It was like vermin; my multitude of little figures swarmed everywhere. They simply _had_ to get rid of me.—I said nothing. I pretended to be possessed. I got a girl-friend in Münich to write enthusiastic letters: her people lived quite near us when we were in Germany.” Kreisler looked at her rather dully, and smiled solemnly, with really something of the misplaced and unaccountable pathos and protest of dogs (although still with a slavish wagging of the tail) at some pleasantry of the master.—Her expansiveness, as a fact, embarrassed him very much at this point. He was divided between his inclination to respond to it in some way, and mature their acquaintance at once, and his determination to be merely a dog. Yet he felt that her familiarity, if adopted, in turn, by him, might not be the right thing. And yet, as it was, he would appear to be holding back, would seem “reserved” in his mere humility. He was a very perplexed dog for some time.