Crammon said: “Child, you are once more omitting the respect due me. Consider my whitening locks, my years and experience. Be humble and learn of me, and don’t mock at your venerable progenitor. My humour? Well, it isn’t the best in the world, I admit. Ah, it was better once. You seem not to know that somewhere in this city, far beyond our haunts, in its slums and morasses, there lives one who was dear to me above all men--Christian Wahnschaffe. You too, in some hoary antiquity, threw out your line after him. Do you remember? Ah, how long ago that is! That would have been a catch. And I, ass that I was, opposed that charming, little intrigue. Perhaps everything might have turned out differently. But complaint is futile. Everything is over between us. There is no path for me to where he is; and yet my soul is driven and goaded toward him, and while I sit here in decent comfort, I feel as though I were committing a scoundrelly action.” Letitia had opened her eyes very wide while he spoke. It was the first time since the days at Wahnschaffe Castle that any one had spoken to her of Christian. His image arose, and she felt within her breast the faint beating of the wings of dread. There was a sweetness in that feeling and a poignancy.... One had to be as capable of forgetting as she was, in order to be able to recapture for a moment, in the deep chiming of a memoried hour, the keen emotion of a long ago. She questioned him. At first he answered reluctantly, sentence by sentence; then, urged on by her impatience, his narrative flowed on. The utter astonishment of Letitia flattered him; he painted his picture in violent colours. Her delicate face mirrored the fleeting emotions of her soul. In her responsive imagination and vibrant heart everything assumed concreteness and immediate vividness. She needed no interpretations; they were all within her. She gazed into that unknown darkness full of presage and full of understanding. In truth, it all seemed familiar to her, familiar like a poem, as though she had lived with Christian all that time, and she knew more than Crammon could tell her, infinitely more, for she grasped the whole, its idea and form, its fatefulness and pain. She glowed and cried: “I must go to him.” But picturing that meeting, she grew frightened, and imagined a rapt look she would use, and Crammon’s lack of intensity annoyed her, and his whine of complaint seemed senseless to her. “I always felt,” she said, with gleaming eyes, “that there was a hidden power in him. Whenever I had wicked little thoughts and he looked at me, I grew ashamed. He could read thoughts even then, but he did not know it.” “I have heard you say cleverer things than you are doing now,” Crammon said, mockingly. But her enthusiasm moved him, and there welled up in him a jealousy of all the men who stretched out their hands after her. “I shall go to him,” she said, smiling, “and ease my heart in his presence.”