"Hm, and yet I think that you yourself are not quite free from it." "I am a Jew, it's a national disease with us. Our respectable members are working to change it into rage or fury. It's a bad habit with the Germans, a kind of emotional slovenliness so to speak." "So there is an excuse for you, not for us." "There is no excuse for diseases either if, fully realising what one is doing, one has missed one's opportunity of protecting oneself against them. But we are beginning to babble in aphorism and are consequently only on the way to half or quarter truths. Let's go back to your quintette. I like the theme of the adagio best." George nodded. "I heard it once in Palermo." "What," said Leo, "is it supposed to be a Sicilian melody?" "No, it rippled to me out of the waves of the sea when I went for a walk one morning along the shore. Being alone is particularly good for my work, so is change of scene. That's why I promise myself all kinds of things from my trip." He told him about Heinrich Bermann's opera plot, which he found very stimulating. When Heinrich came back again, Leo was to make him seriously start on the libretto. "Don't you know yet," said Leo, "his father is dead?" "Really? When? How do you know?" "It was in the paper this morning." They spoke about Heinrich's relationship to the dead man and Leo declared that the world would perhaps get on better if parents would more frequently learn by the experiences of their children instead of asking their children to adapt themselves to their own hoary wisdom. The conversation then turned on the relations between fathers and sons, on true and false kinds of gratefulness, on the dying of people one held dear, on the difference between mourning and grief, on the dangers of memory and the duty of forgetting. George felt that Leo was a very serious thinker, was very solitary and knew how to be so. He felt almost fond of him when the door closed behind him in the late twilight hour and the thought that this man had been Anna's first infatuation did him good. The remaining days passed more quickly than he anticipated, what with purchases, arrangements and all kinds of preparations. And one evening George and Anna drove after each other to the station in two separate vehicles and jestingly greeted each other in the vestibule with great politeness, as though they had been distant acquaintances who had met by accident. "My dear Fräulein Rosner, what a fortunate coincidence! are you also going to Munich by any chance?" "Yes, Herr Baron." "Hullo, that's excellent! and have you a sleeping-car, my dear Fräulein?" "Oh yes, Herr Baron, berth number five." "How strange now, I have number six."