Brand decided to take the risk, and though he asked my advice beforehand, as a matter of friendship, I knew my warnings were useless. It was about a month after that tram journey to Bonn that he came into my room at the Domhof, looking rather pale but with a kind of glitter in his eyes. “I may as well tell you,” he said abruptly, “that I am going to marry a German girl.” “Elsa von Kreuzenach?” “Yes. How did you know?” “Just a guess.” “It’s against her parents’ wish,” he said, “to say nothing of my parents, who think I have gone mad. Elsa and I will have to play a lone hand.” “‘Lone’ is not the word,” I suggested. “You are breaking that taboo we talked of. You will be shunned by every friend you have in the world--except one or two queer people like myself”--(Here he said, “Thanks,” and grinned rather gratefully) “and both you and she will be pariahs in England, Germany, and anywhere on the wide earth where there are English, Germans, French, Americans and others who fought the war. I suppose you know that?” “Perfectly,” he answered, gravely. I told him that I was amazed that he of all men should fall in love with a German girl--he who had seen all the abomination of the war, and had come out to it with a flaming idealism. To that he answered savagely: “Flaming idealism be blowed! I came out with blood-lust in my heart, and having killed until I was sick of killing--German boys who popped their heads over the parapet--I saw that the whole scheme of things was wrong, and that the grey men had no more power of escape than the brown men. We had to go on killing each other because we were both under the same law, thrust upon us by those directing the infernal machinery of world-politics. But that’s not the point, and it’s old and stale, anyhow.” “The point is,” I said, “that you will be looked upon as a traitor by many of your best pals, that you will smash your father and mother, and that this girl Elsa and you will be profoundly miserable.” “We shall be enormously and immensely happy,” he answered, “and that outweighs everything.” He told me that he needed happiness. For more than four years he had suffered agony of mind in the filth and mud of war. He craved for beauty, and Elsa fulfilled his ideal. He had been a lonely devil, and Elsa had offered him the only cure for the worst disease in life, intimate and eternal love. Something prompted me to say words which I deeply regretted as soon as they were spoken. It was the utterance of a subconscious thought. “There is a girl, not German, who might have cured your loneliness. You and Eileen O’Connor would have made good mates.” For some reason he was hit rather hard by that remark. He became exceedingly pale, and for a moment or two did not answer me. I thought he would blurt out some angry reply, damning my impudence, but when he spoke it was in a grave, gentle way which seemed to me more puzzling. “Eileen would make a fine wife for any man she liked. But she’s above most of us.”