oing to do? Groups of eight couples
were forming sets ... A terrible memory made Tonio Kroeger blush. They
were dancing the quadrille.

The music began, and the couples bowed and marched past each other. The
mail clerk called the figures, and he did so, by heaven, in French, and
brought out the nasal sounds in an incomparably distinguished fashion.
Ingeborg Holm was dancing right in front of Tonio Kroeger, in the set
just next to the door. She moved back and forth in front of him,
forward and backward, gliding and whirling; a perfume that came from
her hair or the dainty stuff of her dress reached him occasionally, and
he shut his eyes with a feeling that had been so familiar to him all
his life, whose aroma and bitter stimulus he had faintly discerned
all these last days, and that now filled him again completely
with its sweet distress. What _was_ it? Longing? Tenderness? Envy,
self-contempt?... _Moulinet des dames!_ Did you laugh, blond Inga, did
you laugh at me when I danced _moulinet_ and made such a pitiable fool
of myself? And would you laugh today, now that I have after all become
something like a famous man? Yes, you would, and you would have thrice
as much right as before! And if I, all by myself, had created the Nine
Symphonies, The World as Will and Idea, and the Last Judgment--still
you would be eternally justified in laughing ... He looked at her, and
a line occurred to him which he had long forgotten, and yet was so
familiar and so akin to him: "I fain would sleep, but thou must dance."
He knew so well the deep, clumsy, melancholy Scandinavian awkwardness
of feeling that was expressed by it. To sleep ... To long to live
simply and wholly for the feeling that sweetly and indolently satisfies
itself, without the obligation of becoming a deed and a dance--and
nevertheless to dance, to have to execute nimbly and with presence of
mind the hard, hard and dangerous knife-dance of art, without ever
quite forgetting the humiliating contradiction that lay in having to
dance while one was in love ...

All at once the whole throng broke into mad and exuberant motion. The
sets had broken up, and the dancers shot around jumping and gliding:
the quadrille was ending with a galop. The couples flew past Tonio
Kroeger to the furious beat of the music, _chasseing_, hurrying,
overtaking each other, with quick, breathless laughter. One couple came
along, carried away by the universal race, whirling and whizzing
forward. The