But while all this sank heavily into his soul he agreed in a light tone that she was really quite right and that letters--even though they were actually twenty pages long--could not contain much in particular; and while a harrowing pity for her sprang up in him he gently expressed the hope that there would be a time in which they would neither of them any longer be thrown back upon mere letters. And then he found words of greater tenderness, told her of those lonely walks of his in the outskirts of the strange town when he thought of her; told her of the hours in that meaningless hotel room, with its view of the linden-planted square, and of his yearning for her, which was always present whether he sat alone at his work or accompanied singers at the pianoforte or chatted with new acquaintances. But when he stood with her in front of the house door, with her hand in his, and looked up into her eyes as he murmured a bright goodbye, he was shocked to see in them the flickering out of a jaded sense of disillusionment that had almost ceased to be painful. And he knew that all the words which he had spoken to her had meant nothing to her, had meant less than nothing, since the one word, the word she scarcely hoped for any more, and yet longed for all the time, had not come. A quarter of an hour later George was sitting in his stall at the opera. He was first a little depressed and limp, but the pleasure of enjoyment soon began to course through his veins. And when Brangäne threw the king's cloak over her mistress's shoulders, Kurwenal announced the king's approach and the ship's crew on the deck hailed the land amid all the glory of the resplendent heavens, George had long ago forgotten a bad night in the train, some boring commissions, an extremely forced conversation with an old Jewish doctor and a walk on the wet pavement which mirrored the light of the lamps by the side of a young lady who looked decent, distinguished and somewhat depressed. And when the curtain fell for the first time and the light streamed through the enormous room, upholstered in red and gold, he did not feel any unpleasant sense of being brought back to sober life, but he rather felt as though he were plunging his head out of one dream into another; while a reality which was full of all kinds of wretched complications flew impotently past somewhere outside. The atmosphere of this house, so it seemed to him, had never made him so intensely happy as it did to-day. He had never felt so palpably that all the audience, so long as they were here, were protected in some mystic way against all the pain and all the dirt of life. He stood up in his corner seat, which was in front by the middle gangway, saw many a pleased glance turn towards him and felt conscious of looking handsome, elegant and even somewhat unusual. And besides that he was--and this filled him with satisfaction--a man who had a profession, a position, a man who