some remarks about his position and circumstances, and related the little I had heard of them from acquaintances; that she had had a daughter, who had died about a year ago.
The musician sat silently opposite to me, often emptying his glass and not always remembering to fill mine—he had ordered another bottle, and dedicated it with a glass to "Die schöne Jagemann." I also was silent. "Wir schwiegen uns aus" (We exhausted our silence), as Schumann once is supposed to have said.
When I was in bed on that night I realised that, in a moral lethargy, I had been on the brink of committing a dishonourable and foolish act, though no one would have called it the first, and all would have called it wise. From that day I ceased to visit the house of the owner of the cloth-factory.
My uncle reproached me for my fickleness. I complained of home-sickness, and told him that I wanted to visit my old friends. A week after I was in Copenhagen.
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My acquaintances in Denmark were not many, and none of them associated directly with the Stephensens. But, thanks to the gossips of our capital, I heard a good deal about them at second or third hand. There could hardly be anything remarkable in my asking about the fate of a Dresden acquaintance in Denmark; and if some people suspected a deeper interest, I did not care much what they thought. I wanted to know the real truth.
The usual opinion was that they lived happily together—it was a love-marriage, affection from youth, perhaps first love. Others said that his flirtations—a sharp tongue called them liaisons—could hardly escape her knowledge, and that she seemed to be rather passionate and impetuous. On
