She said: “It is ever so funny that I should be living in this city of egoists. I am the direct antithesis of such brave persons.” Nothing seemed worth doing to her, not even what her heart demanded loudly--the setting out to find Christian. She waited for some compulsion, but none came. She lost herself in trivial fancies. She would sit in a corner, and watch things and people with her clever eyes. “If that bearded man,” she thought, “had the nose of his bald neighbour he might look quite human.” Or: “Why are there six stucco roses above the door? Why not five or seven?” She tormented herself with these things. The wrongly placed nose and the perverse number of the stucco roses incited her to plan the world’s improvement. Suddenly she would laugh, and then blush if people looked her way. Every night, before she fell asleep, she thought, in spite of herself, of Amadeus Voss and of her promise to write him. Then she would take flight in sleep and forget the morrow. His long letter weighed on her memory as the most painful experience of her life. Words that made her restless emerged from it in her consciousness--the saying, for instance, concerning the shadow’s yearning for its body. The words’ mystery lured her on. All voices in the outer world warned her. Their warning but heightened the sting of allurement. She enjoyed her fear and let it grow. The reflection of mirrored things in other mirrors of the mind confused her. At last she wrote; an arrow flew from the taut string. They met on Kurfürsten Square, and walked up the avenue of chestnut trees toward Charlottenburg. In order to limit the interview, Johanna announced that she must be home at the end of an hour. But the path they chose robbed her of the hope of a quite brief interview. She yielded. To hide her embarrassment, she remarked jestingly on the trees, houses, monuments, beasts, and men. Voss preserved a dry seriousness. She turned to him impatiently. “Well, teacher, aren’t you going to talk a bit to the well-behaved little pupil with whom you’re taking a walk?” But Voss had no understanding of the nervous humour of her gentle rebuke. He said: “I am an easy prey; you have but to mock, and I am without defence. I must accustom myself to such lightness and smoothness. It is a bad tone for us to use. You keep looking at me searchingly, as though my sleeve might be torn or my collar stained. I had determined to speak to you as to a comrade. It cannot be done. You are a young lady, and I am hopelessly spoiled for your kind.”