"Yes, isn't it true," she cried, infected by his ardour, "that there is the home of all great ideas? There you may feel your utmost. What you have sown there will repay and bear fruit. Isn't it so? I have never been there, but I am quite sure that is how people feel. There, where everything great and beautiful belongs to the soil; there, one's self becomes greater and nobler.... One has no more petty sordid cares. Isn't it true?" He had listened to her astounded, his eyes beaming and radiant. "Yes," he said almost solemnly, "it is exactly as you say." She felt a sensation of joy. Wasn't this harmony of thought a confirmation of the affinity that she had from the first moment that she had set eyes on him sought and hoped for? Nothing could ever separate her from him after this. Perhaps he really was the physical embodiment of that shadow belonging to the Dresden days that had taken up its abode in her soul! "I can't help feeling as if we had met before," she murmured softly, with eyes downcast. "I feel like that too," he answered, "but it can't be so, for if we had met I could never have forgotten the time and place." "You were not in Dresden, by any chance, about this time six years ago?" she asked. He shook his head. "Six years ago I was studying in Bonn. The term was over, it is true, but I went for my vacation to my uncle's. He had just had his place restored." "Where is it?" "Near Coblentz." "Then it couldn't have been. It's strange that we should both feel as if ..." she said. "There are certain pictures belonging to our psychic existence," he replied, "which seem like memories, and are in reality presentiments." "I wonder what you mean?" "I mean that one walks between past and coming experiences as on a tight-rope; that one reels and falls into space so soon as----" "What?" "So soon as one----" he broke off abruptly. "Pardon my asking, but are you an artist?" "Why?" she asked nervously. She felt repelled. Was he making a fool of her? "I gathered that you were from the plate outside your door." The plate: "Pressed Flower Studio." This was being rudely awakened from a pleasant dream to the stern facts of reality. But she must not lose her presence of mind and forfeit his esteem, so she answered carelessly: "In a way. But mine is a very modest art. Once I worked hard at it, and it made me very happy. I learnt it soon after I became a widow." Her lips refused to utter the phrase, "soon after I was divorced." "I took it up more as a little distraction than as a serious means of earning a living. But then I had trouble with my eyes, and was obliged to give it up." Three lies in one breath! But why not? She and everything round her was one big lie ... all her gestures and all her thoughts. Only the cry that went up from her soul now, moving her to the depths of her being, was _not_ a lie: "You shall be mine. I will be yours." And so for his sake she went on lying.