"Not at all, but you do not know us well enough yet, and we don't know you."
"I am slow at making acquaintances—in fact, I never really get to know people. I ought not to have come tonight, when you were kind enough to ask me. Perhaps one needs training to enjoy oneself too," he said, with a short laugh.
"Of course one does." He could hear from her voice that she was smiling.
"I was twenty-five when I started and, you can take it from me, I had no easy time at first."
"You? I thought that you artists always.… For that matter, I did not think you were twenty-five or near it."
"I am, thank goodness, and considerably more."
"Do you thank Heaven for that? And I, a man, for every year that drops from me as it were into eternity, without having brought me anything but the humiliation of finding that nobody has any use for meI" He stopped suddenly, terrified. He heard that his voice trembled, and he concluded that the wine had gone to his head, since he could speak like that to a woman he did not even know. But in spite of his shyness he went on: "It seems quite hopeless. My father has told me about the young men of his time, about their eager discussions and their great illusions. I have never had a single illusion to talk about all these years, that now are gone, lost, never to return."
"You have no right to say that, Mr. Gram. Not one year of one's life is wasted, as long as you have not reached a point where suicide is the only way out. I don't believe that the old generation, those from the time of the great illusions, were better off than we. The dreams of their youth stripped life bare for them. We young people, most of the ones I know, have started life without illusions. We were thrown into the struggle for existence almost before we were grown up, and from the first we have looked at life with open eyes, expecting
