On this evening he took away with him an image of her, with the thick blond braid, the elongated, laughing blue eyes, and a delicately marked saddle of freckles on her nose, and could not sleep for hearing the ring in her voice, softly trying to imitate the intonation with which she had uttered the insignificant word, and quivering as he did so. Experience taught him that this was love. But although he knew perfectly that love must inevitably bring him much pain, affliction, and humiliation, that it moreover destroys peace and overfills the heart with sweet melodies, without giving a man peace enough to round off any one thing and calmly weld it into a unified whole, yet he entertained it with joy, surrendered wholly to it, and nursed it with all the powers of his spirit; for he knew that it gives life and riches, and he longed to be alive and rich, instead of calmly welding anything into a unified whole. This loss of Tonio Kröger's heart to merry Inga Holm occurred in the empty drawing-room of Mrs. Consul Husteede, whose turn it was that evening to have the dancing class; for it was a private class, to which only members of the first families belonged, and they assembled in turn in the parental houses in order to receive instruction in dancing arid deportment. For this special purpose dancing-master Knaak came over every week from Hamburg. Francois Knaak was his name, and what a man he was! "_J'ai l'honneur de me vous représenter_," he would say, "_mon nom est_ Knaak ... And this one does not say while one is bowing, but when one is again standing upright--not loudly and yet clearly. One is not every day in a position where one must introduce oneself in French, but if one can do so correctly and flawlessly in that language, then one will certainly not fail in German." How wonderfully the silky black frock-coat clung about his fat hips! In soft folds his trousers fell to his patent-leather pumps, which were adorned with broad satin bows, and his brown eyes looked about with a satiated happiness at their own beauty. Every one was crushed by the excess of assurance and decorum in him. He would glide--and none could glide like him, elastic, rocking, swaying, royal--up to the mistress of the house, bow, and wait for her to extend her hand to him. When he had received it, he would thank her in a low voice, step back springily, turn on his left foot, snap the toe of his right foot sidewise off the floor, and glide away with swaying hips. One went out of the door backward and bowing when one left a company; one did not bring up a chair by seizing one leg of it, or dragging it along the floor, but one carried it lightly by the back and set it down noiselessly. One did not stand with hands folded on the--pardon!-- belly, and the tongue thrust into the cheek; but if one did so none the less, M. Knaak had such a fashion of doing likewise that one preserved for the rest of his days a loathing for this attitude.