He had been told this as he was told all the news of the lower world, but he had paid no attention to the anecdote, and it had slipped from his memory. Now it emerged in his mind and fitted the case in question. An instinct told him that it fitted; but that very perception increased his feeling of defencelessness before this man who seemed now to be gazing into him and tearing from him things silent and hidden and even forgotten. He must follow up the rumour, and very secretively get to the bottom of it and test it. In order to say something and tear himself away at last, he murmured that he’d see what could be done, but the gentleman mustn’t count on him, because spying was not his kind of business. He dragged himself shiftily to the door with a wavering, withered expression. He rubbed his moist fingers together and lit a cigarette, shivered in the coolness that met him from the outer hall, and turned up the collar of his yellow overcoat. Christian courteously accompanied him to the door, and said softly: “I hope to see you soon. I shall expect you.” On the landing of the second storey Niels Heinrich stopped and laughed his goat-like laugh senselessly into the void. XIII Prince Wiguniewski wrote to Cornelius Ermelang at Vaucluse in the South of France: “In your Petrarchan solitude you seem to have lost all touch with the world, since you inquire so insistently after our diva. I thought you were still in Paris and that you had seen Eva Sorel. For she returned from there only a few weeks ago--returned like a general after a victorious campaign of three weeks, full of fame and booty. Didn’t you learn from the newspapers at least of the feverish enthusiasm which she has recently created in international society? “In your inquiry there is an undertone of anxiety. I understand the reason for it, even though you are reserved on that point. Brief as your visit to her during your stay in Petrograd may have been, your eyes, which are so practised in reading the souls of men, must have perceived the change that has come over her. I hesitate to call that change one that should cause us anxiety, for doubtless it conforms somehow to the law of her being. Yet to behold it means pain to us who witnessed her beginnings and her rise--to those ten or twelve people in Europe, the fairest experience of whose youth was her sweetness and radiance and starry freedom from earth’s heaviness. She was timeless; she was at each moment that very moment’s gift. I need not describe to you what she was; you knew her. But is it for us to quarrel or mourn because a given development does not correspond to our expectations? However we may strive and cry, that which has become and now is unquestionably holds the wiser and the deeper sense of life. We always want too much, and so end by seeing and understanding too little. We need more humility.