"You cannot imagine, my child, how important it is, when one lives in such close contact with another human being, not to lose one's touch with oneself. Keep a corner reserved for your own thoughts--they will amuse you greatly. He who likes to eat fresh eggs must raise his own chickens. Don't forget that. But keep your corner to yourself. Offer no superfluous resistance. No obstinacy. From the very start you must provide the course of your life with a double track, so that you can ride in either direction, as need be. I shouldn't wonder if under such conditions it wouldn't turn out to be quite a happy marriage, entirely apart from the external advantages--so long as they last--these are matters of adaptation and good luck which our will cannot control in advance. I will send you the marriage contract sealed. Until your coming of age--in about two years, I believe--I am at your disposal. If after a time you see that the milk in your cup has turned permanently sour, break the seal. A thorough lawyer can read all sorts of surprises out of the contract, which laymen do not immediately realise. But, as I said, in _one_ case he cannot. Beware of that one case. It is called _in flagranti_. Some time cautiously inquire into its meaning. There you are! Now, may I give the colonel your consent?" CHAPTER XIII The train rumbled on in the night. Showers of sparks flew past the window. When the stoker added coal, a beam of light was projected far into the darkness, and for an instant created out of the black void purple pine trees, snowy roofs gleaming golden, and fields mottled with yellow. How beautiful and strange it was! Lilly leaned her head, heavy with champagne, back against the red velvet cushion. It was over. A whirl of images, real and imaginary, flitted back and forth in her brain. A great black inkwell and a little man with a grey beard behind it asking all sorts of useless questions. A white cloud of lace and a myrtle wreath thrown over her head by the wife of the manager of the war office, who fell from one fit of rapture into another. A hateful Protestant minister with two ridiculous little white bibs. He looked like a grave-digger, but he spoke so exquisitely, after all, that you wanted to throw your arms about his neck, and cry. Two black and two gay gentlemen. One of the black gentlemen, Mr. Pieper, one of the gay gentlemen, the colonel. "The colonel's wife--the colonel's wife," throbbed the wheels. But if she listened carefully, she also heard them say what the gentlemen had kept saying to her that day: "La--dy Mertzbach--La--dy Mertzbach." Keeping time. Keeping time. The ice cream had been a perfect marvel, a regular mine with shafts and tunnels and mineral veins, and little lights, which set the cut-glass a-sparkle. She could have sat there forever staring at it, but she had to dig in with a large gold spoon, so that a whole mountain side gave way.