"I could not invite you to come in otherwise," he said, smiling nervously. "The consequences might be serious for both of us. But if you come as an emissary, that makes all the difference. Please come in." Lilly had pictured him in a suite of lofty apartments filled with books, curios, instruments, and statues of great men. She was horrified to find that he lived in one small room. The bed was still unmade; besides the bed there was no furniture except a couple of chairs, a folding-table, a clothes-rack and a stand for books containing a few shabbily-bound volumes and paper-covered periodicals. "This is a worse place than ours," she thought, and felt less shy as she sat down on one of the two chairs. Poverty seemed a bond between them. "How very kind of the young ladies to think of me!" he said. Lilly remembered the flowers that she held in her hand. "Will you accept these?" she asked, offering them to him. He took the bunch of roses and held them against his face without a word of thanks. "They have no smell," he remarked. "They are the last roses, but my first, so you can imagine how much I appreciate them." Lilly's eyes grew dim with delight. "Are you still in great pain, Dr. Maelzer?" she stammered forth. He laughed. "Pain? ... Oh dear no! I am feverish now and then, that's all. It's quite amusing to be feverish. One's soul floats away in an airship far away over cities, land, and sea, over centuries; one is visited by distinguished persons, if not so beautiful as----" He paused in the middle of his compliment, thinking of their relations as master and pupil. His confusion seemed to clear his vision. He fixed his eyes, which burned like two flames in blue cavities, on her and asked in a voice which sounded higher pitched and hoarser than usual: "What's your name?" "I am Lilly--Lilly Czepanek." The name conveyed nothing to him, because he had not lived long in the town. "You think of taking up teaching?" "Yes, doctor." "Listen to my advice. Don't! Go to Russia and hurl bombs. Go to a hospital and wash feet. Marry a drunken scoundrel who'll ill-treat you and sell the very bed you lie on. Anything rather than being a teacher. You mustn't be a teacher, not _you_." "But why shouldn't I?" she asked. "I'll tell you.... The qualifications for a teacher are a flat chest, weak eyes, poor hair, and a character that can see one side of a question only. People whose nerves and blood are too feeble to live their own lives are good enough to teach others, but those whose blood courses through their veins like molten fire, whose eyes are filled with longing, to whom the problems of life are there for seeing and knowing, not for blind mechanical vivisection, they--but I mustn't go on, though I should like to." "Oh, please go on--please," Lilly besought him. "How old are you?" "Sixteen." "And a woman already!" He looked at her with an expression of tortured admiration.