Two days later she went to Christian’s dwelling. The wife of the night watchman Gisevius ushered her into Christian’s room. Shivering and oppressed by the room, in which she could not imagine him, she waited for over an hour. Frau Gisevius advised her to look in at Karen Engelschall’s or the Hofmanns’ flat. To this she could not make up her mind. “I’ll come again,” she said. When she stepped out into the street she saw Amadeus Voss. He greeted her without words, and his expression seemed to take it for granted that they had agreed to meet here. He walked on at her side. “I love you, Johanna,” he said. She did not answer, nor turn her eyes toward him. She walked more swiftly, then more slowly, then more swiftly again. “I love you, Johanna,” said Amadeus Voss, and his teeth rattled. XV On the alabaster mantelshelf candles were burning in the silver Renaissance candlesticks. The more salient light of the burning logs reached only far enough to envelop the figures of Eva and of Cornelius Ermelang in its glow. It did not penetrate as far as the porphyry columns or the gold of the ceiling. A dim, red flicker danced in the tall mirrors, and the purple damask curtains before the huge windows, which shut in the room more solemnly than the great doors, absorbed the remnants of light without reflection. The tea-gown of white lace which the dancer wore--experts declared each square inch of it to have the value of a provincial governor’s annual pay--was vivid as a fantastic pastel on the side turned to the fire. “You have been very kind to me,” said Eva. “After you had been here so many times in vain, I was afraid you would leave without having seen me. But Susan probably told you how my days are spent. Men and happenings whirl through them so that I find it hard to retain a consciousness of my own self. Thus friends become estranged, and the faces about me change and I hardly notice it. A mad life!” “Yet you summoned me in spite of that,” Ermelang whispered, “and I have the happiness of being with you at last. Now I have attained everything that my stay in Russia promised. How shall I thank you? I have only my poor words.” He looked at her with emotion, with a kind of ecstasy in his watery blue eyes. He had a habit of repeating the formula concerning his poor words; but despite the artifices of his speech, his feeling was genuine. Indeed, there was always a trifle too much feeling, too much soulfulness in his speech. Sometimes the impression arose that he was in reality not quite so deeply stirred, and that, if necessary, he could well limit his emotional expansion. “What would one not do to please a poet?” Eva said with a courteous gesture. “It is pure selfishness too. I would have the image of me made perpetual in your mind. Both ancient and modern tyrants assure us that the only man whom they strove to please is the poet.”