He sighed, and drew from his inner pocket a tiny album in a precious binding. He always had it with him, for it contained twelve exquisite photographs of the dancer, Eva Sorel. “She is like a boy,” he said, wholly absorbed in the pictures, “a slender, swift, unapproachable boy. She stands on the mystic boundary line of the sexes; she is that equivocal and twofold thing that maddens men if they but think of flesh and blood. Elusive she is as a lizard, and chill in love as an Amazon. Do you not feel a touch of horror, Christian? Does not a cold ichor trickle through your veins, when you imagine her in your arms, breast to breast? I feel that horror! For there would be something of the perverse in it--something of an unnatural violation. He who has touched her lips is lost. We saw that for ourselves.” Christian suddenly felt a yearning to be alone in a forest, in a dark and silent forest. He did feel a sense of horror, but in a way utterly alien to Crammon’s thought. He looked at the older man, and it was hard for him to comprehend that there, opposite him, sat his familiar friend, whose face and form he had seen a thousand times unreflectively. Crammon, contemplating the photograph on which Eva appeared dancing with a basket of grapes, began again: “Sweetest Ariel, they are all harlots, all, all, all, whether shameless and wild or fearful and secretive: you alone are pure--a vestal, a half-ghost, a weaver of silk, like the spider, who conquers the air upon her half-spun web. Let us drink, O friend! We are made of dirt, and must be medicined by fire!” He drained his glass, rested his head upon his hand, and sank into melancholy contemplation. Suddenly Christian said: “Bernard, I believe that we must part.” Crammon stared at him, as though he had not heard right. “I believe that we must part,” Christian repeated softly and with an indistinct smile. “I fear that we are no longer suited to each other. You must go your ways, and I shall go mine.” Crammon’s face became dark red with astonishment and rage. He brought his fist down on the table and gritted his teeth. “What do you mean? Do you think you can send me packing as though I were a servant? Me?” He arose, took his hat and coat, and went. Christian sat there for long with his thoughts. The indistinct smile remained on his lips. When Christian, on awakening next day, rang for his valet, Crammon entered the room in the man’s stead and made a deep bow. Over his left arm he had Christian’s garments, in his right hand his boots. He said good-morning quite in the valet’s tone, laid the clothes on a chair, set the boots on the floor, asked whether the bath was to be prepared at once, and what Herr Wahnschaffe desired for breakfast. And he did all this with complete seriousness, with an almost melancholy seriousness, and with a certain charm within the rôle he was assuming that could not fail to be pleasing.