d she would not accept a
man who took her merely because she had a rich father.

That the beautiful Fraeulein was her cousin did indeed seem strange to
her. At first she laughed at the idea, as if it were all a joke; then
she blushed crimson, no one knew why, stood up suddenly, made her
father a stiff courtesy, and hurried out of the room.

With a sigh the baron left the old man's lodgings, to go and give his
old companion-in-arms, Schnetz, an account of this unsuccessful attempt
at reconciliation.

Ever since the wedding evening the lieutenant, too, had felt himself in
a misanthropic and depressed state of mind, which kept him at home for
months and made him forget Paradise utterly; all the more readily
because it seemed to him that Jansen's presence there was necessary to
its very existence. His artistic talent was, after all, merely the
shadow cast by his character when it chanced to stand in a humorous
light. He had taken up with the artists because their society seemed to
him more tolerable than any other that came within the great dreariness
of his ordinary life, less because they created beautiful works than
because they were men who were capable of producing something that lay
beyond the pale of ordinary society, for which he had a profound
contempt. Even they did not escape his Thersites mood. But the fact
that he had discovered one among them at whom he found it absolutely
impossible to rail, and whom he had not the heart to ridicule even with
his black art, had inspired him with a strange feeling toward Jansen;
as though, if the whole decaying world should fall to pieces and leave
only this one man, nothing would really be lost, and the human race,
copied after this model, would be restored to a far higher grandeur. He
had really _loved_ this man, carefully as he tried to conceal such
"sentimentalities" from every one, especially from himself. And now he
sat alone again in his Timonian bitterness, cutting silhouettes in the
dark, and angry with all other men because all of them taken together
could not compensate him for the loss of this one.

He received the baron exceedingly badly, listened to his account of his
unloving child with a sardonic grin, and assured him that the only
consolation he found in this whole muddle of a world was that there
were still a few beings left, even of the female sex, who would not let
themselves be fooled by fine words, and who spoke out just what they
thought. He advised