But he wanted, he wanted very much to understand, and failing to say as much in words, he wanted more definitely to take up Hildegard’s arm in his hands. He wanted to touch her. Perhaps he was in love. He wanted, in an agony of discomfort, to explore this new sensation with his hands. Her silence left him in a state of painful expectation and desire.

Perhaps I understand, he said awkwardly. Better than you think.

She smiled at him doubtfully, though warmly, looking through him with her pale eyes.

Nobody understands, she sighed.

He tried not to hear her satisfaction. He wanted her to remain physical. His eyes rested, diffidently, on her breasts.

I expect you think I’m quite an ordinary person, she said. Like Onkel Rudi. Onkel Rudi is against me. Perhaps you’ll have noticed that. Onkel Rudi is bitter and middle-aged. He hates me because I am young.

Drawing him into a world of her own, making him acknowledge this, he began to doubt the reality of trees, the stones their feet touched in fording a stream, all these were unreal, undergoing some form of reconstruction in Hildegard’s voice.

But I’m a match for Rudi, she said. Rudi is dead. But you can’t kill ideals.

The remnant of a now almost non-existent Elyot Standish told him this was the place to laugh. But undergoing the change, he had begun to settle into a sort of surprised solemnity. They had sat down in a clearing and begun to eat the little, meagre packages of bread and cheese put up by Frau Fiesel earlier that morning. He sat and watched Hildegard eat bread and cheese. The impatient, sensual movements of her mouth. He wished she would stay like this, quiet, let him explore the painful feeling in his stomach.

All that late afternoon, wandering, sitting, in the forest Hildegard made with her voice, out of her own opinions and obsessions, he knew that he was not himself. He was a strange person, subscribing to arguments in which, soberly, he could not believe. But he watched, he listened to her, he was obsessed himself, with the form of Hildegard. He was becoming what she wanted him to become. His hands took the glass beer mug when they sat in the little forest beer garden, his mouth went through the business of drinking beer, his feet followed her along the path, past the cascade that fell into a basin of acid moss.

Everything in Germany was too green. There was a hectic, feverish tone about the undergrowth, from which you could detach a smell, strange and repellent, of rotting leaves. Passing a cemetery at dusk, the urns wept white draperies.

Ach, sighed Hildegard. She sometimes wished she were dead.

This did not sound ridiculous, as it might still by daylight, with some traces of judgement left. He no longer questioned the emotional crises with which Hildegard’s life seemed swept. Dusk and his own feelings, the scent of ivy on a wall and the pulse in his own throat, announced a rightness in her sentiments. He was overflowing with a sentimental devotion, that he wanted to, had somehow to express. Remembering Werther, he had a suspicion that this was probably a Great Love.