“You think so?” Cornelius asked, standing at the house door. “Well, you are an expert, a champion. But see that you don’t get curvature of the spine bending down to her!”
He waved his hand and went out. “Nice boy,” he thought, as he left the garden. “A student of engineering, sees his way clearly—everything in order there. And then so good-looking and pleasant.” And he was once more seized by paternal envy, because of his “poor Bert”—by strange perturbations which caused him to see the life of this young stranger in the rosiest light, and that of his son in the most dismal. In such a mood he began his evening walk.
He went up the boulevard, crossed the bridge, and then walked upstream for a bit, along the river promenade to the third bridge. It was wet and cold, and now and then there was a flurry of snow. He had turned up the collar of his overcoat, and held his cane against his back, the crook hooked over one forearm, and now and again he drew deep breaths of the wintry evening air. His mind wandered to learned matters, as usual during these walks, to his lecture at the university, to the sentences that he was going to utter tomorrow in relation to Philip’s battle against the revolutionary tendency of the Germanic spirit, sentences which were to be packed with justice and melancholy. Especially with justice, he thought. Justice was the soul of scholarship, the principle of knowledge and of light, and the young people must be shown them in this relationship, not only because of the intellectual discipline, but for human and personal reasons—in order not to offend them nor to antagonize their political opinions, which today, of course, were terribly split up and full of contrarieties; it had all resulted in heaping up a good deal of explosive matter. To draw down the disapproval of one side was easy, and even to cause a scandal, should one take sides in an historical matter. But taking sides, he thought, was also unhistorical; justice alone was historical. Only, to be sure, for that very reason and rightly considered—justice was not hot-blooded youth nor fresh, adventurous faith and resolution; it was melancholy. But as it was melancholy by nature, it naturally and secretly sympathized with the melancholy, the hopeless part—with historical power more than with what is fresh, adventurous, and resolute. Was it possible that in the last analysis this justice consisted of such sympathy and could not exist without it? And possibly, after all, justice did not exist? the professor asked himself, and was so absorbed in this thought that he threw his letters into the letter-box at the bridge almost unconsciously and began to walk back. The thought he had awakened and pursued was a thought disturbing to learning, but the thought itself was part of science, learning, and scholarship, a theme for the intellect and conscience and psychology, and he was in duty bound to accept it without prejudice, whether it disturbed him or not.—It was with such musings that Doctor Cornelius returned home.
Xavier was standing in the arch of the front entrance, apparently on the lookout for him.
“Herr Professor,” said Xavier, in his rich Bavarian accent, moving his thick lips in the dark and giving a toss to his hair, “you’d better go right up and see Lorie. It’s terrible; she’s gone all to pieces.”
“Whats the matter?” asked Cornelius, frightened. “Is she ill?”
“No, not exactly,” replied Xavier. “But she’s upset all right, cryin’ her eyes out. It’s about the gent that danced with her, that one in the dinner-coat, Herr Hergesell. We couldn’t get her out of the hall, not a one of us, and she cried and cried—bucketfuls. She’s all broke up—it’s terrible!”
“Nonsense,” said the professor, who had stepped into the house and tossed his things into the cloakroom. He said nothing further, opened the curtained glass door to the hall, and without even so much as a glance at the company hurried up the stairs to the right. He took the stairs two at a time and hurried across the upper hall and another small space directly into the nursery, followed by Xavier, who stayed at the door.
The nursery was brightly illuminated. There was a gaily coloured paper frieze that ran around the walls, there was a big set of shelves filled with a confusion of toys, a rocking-horse with red-varnished nostrils braced its hoofs against its curved rockers, and other toys—a small trumpet, building-blocks, railroad cars—lay scattered upon the linoleum of the floor. The little white beds with their straight railings stood quite close together: Lorie’s in the corner near the window, and Biter’s a yard from it, both projecting into the room.
Biter was sleeping. As usual he had said his prayers in a loud vibrant voice with the assistance of Blue Anna, and had then fallen instantly into that stormy, red-glowing, tremendously deep sleep from which not even a cannon-shot fired off beside his couch could wake him. His clenched fists, thrown back upon the pillow, were resting on both sides of his head, close to that little wig of his, ruffled by vehement sleep and all tangled and awry.
Lorie’s bed was surrounded by women. There was Blue Anna and there were the Hinterhöfer ladies, standing about the railing of the bed, consulting together. They stepped aside as the professor drew near and he saw Lorie sitting against the middle of her little pillow, pale and sobbing. She cried as Doctor Cornelius had never known her to cry. Her beautiful little hands were resting on the counterpane before her; her little nightgown, trimmed with a narrow edging of lace, had slipped down from her birdlike, slight little shoulders. Her head, that sweet little head that Cornelius so loved, because with the projecting lower part of the face resting upon the thin neck it always reminded him of a flower upon its stem, was inclined
