"As it is, we live happily and at peace," he went on, "Each of us has liberty and an individual existence and yet we know how deeply rooted our hearts are in each other." She heaved a sigh of painful oppression. "Aren't you content?" he asked, "For heaven's sake! Surely!" Her voice was frightened, "No one could be more content than I. If only----" "Well--what?" "If only it weren't for the lonely evenings!" A silence ensued. This was a sore point and had always been. He knew it well. But he had to have his evenings to himself. There was nothing to be done about that. "You musn't think me immodest in my demands," she went on in hasty exculpation. "I'm not even aiming my remarks at you ... I'm only thinking aloud.... But you see, I can't get any real foothold in society until--until my affairs are more clarified.... To run about the drawing-rooms as an example of frivolous heedlessness--that's not my way.... I can always hear them whisper behind me: 'She doesn't take it much to heart, that shows ...' No, I'd rather stay at home. I have no friends either and what chance had I to make them? You were always my one and only friend.... My books remain. And that's very well by day ... but when the lamps are lit I begin to throb and ache and run about ... and I listen for the trill of the door-bell. But no one comes, nothing--except the evening paper. And that's only in winter. Now it's brought before dusk. And in the end there's nothing worth while in it.... And so life goes day after day. At last one creeps into bed at half-past nine and, of course, has a wretched night." "Well, but how am I to help you, dear child?" he asked thoughtfully. He was touched by her quiet, almost serene complaint. "If we took to passing our evenings together, scandal would soon have us by the throat, and then--woe to you!" Her eager eyes gazed bravely at him. "Well," she said at last, "suppose----" "What?" "Never mind. I don't want you to think me unwomanly. And what I've been describing to you is, after all, only a symptom. There's a kind of restlessness in me that I can't explain.... If I were of a less active temper, things would be better.... It sounds paradoxical, but just because I have so much activity in me, do I weary so quickly. Goethe said once----" He raised his hands in laughing protest. She was really frightened. "Ah, yes, forgive me," she cried. "All that was to be swept out.... How forgetful one can be...." Smiling, she leaned her head against his shoulder and was not to be persuaded from her silence. Chapter VI "There are delicate boundaries within the realm of the eternal womanly,"--thus Niebeldingk reflected next day,--"in which one is sorely puzzled as to what one had better put into an envelope: a poem or a cheque." His latest adventure--the cause of these reflections--had blossomed, the evening before, like the traditional rose on the dungheap.