“You were wiser in those days when you played at ball in that beautiful room while the lightning flashed,” Crammon murmured, lost in memories. “Has madness overtaken you, little girl, that you would act the part of a Magdalene?” “I’d like, just once, to live for a month in utter loneliness,” Letitia said, yearningly. “And then?” “Then perhaps I should understand the world. Ah, everything is so mysterious and so sad.” “Youth! Youth! Thy words are fume and folly!” Crammon sighed, and reached for a second apple. At this point the dressmaker arrived with a new evening gown for Letitia. She withdrew to her room, and after a little while she reappeared, excited by her frock, and demanding that Crammon admire her, since she felt worthy of admiration. Yet a patina of melancholy shimmered on her, and even while she imagined the admiring looks that would soon be fixed on her--for Crammon’s did not suffice her--she dreamed with a sense of luxury of renunciation and of turning from the world. And while she went to her aunt to collect the tribute of that lady’s noisier admiration, she still dreamed of renunciation and of turning from the world. A bunch of roses was brought her. But even while she gave herself up to their beauty and fragrance with a characteristic completeness, she grew pale and thought of Christian’s hard and sombre life; and she determined to go to him. Only that night there was a ball at the house of Prince Radziwill. There she met Wolfgang Wahnschaffe, but avoided him with an instinctive timidity. She was a great success. Her nature and fate had reached a peak of life and exercised an assured magic from which, in innocent cunning, she wrung all possible advantages. On the way home in the motor she asked Crammon: “Tell me, Bernard, doesn’t Judith live in Berlin too? Do you ever hear from her? Is she happy with her actor? Why don’t we call on her?” “No one will prevent you from calling on her,” answered Crammon. The snow was falling thickly. “She lives in Matthäikirch Street. I cannot tell you whether she is happy; it doesn’t interest me. One would have a lot to do if one insisted on finding out whether the women who drag our friends to the nuptial couch discover the game to have been worth the candle or not. One thing is certain--Lorm is no longer what he was, the incomparable and unique. I once called him the last prince in a world doomed to hopeless vulgarization. That is all over. He is going downhill, and therefore I avoid him. There is nothing sadder on earth than a man who deteriorates and an artist who loses himself. And it is the woman’s fault. Ah, yes, you may laugh--it is her fault.” “How cruel you are, and how malevolent,” said Letitia, and sleepily leaned her cheek against his shoulder.