ndow, leaned out on the sill:
a wave of warm air filled the room. Maurice rose with renewed decision,
and sought his hat. But Krafft also took his down from a peg. "Yes, let
us go out."

It was a breathless August night, laden with intensified scents and
smells, and the moonlight lay thick and white on the ground: a night to
provoke to extravagant follies. In the utter stillness of the woods,
the young men passed from places of inky blackness into bluish white
patches, dropped through the trees like monstrous silver thalers. The
town lay behind them in a glorifying haze; the river stretched
silver-scaled in the moonlight, like a gigantic fish-back.

Krafft walked in front of his companion, in preoccupied silence. His
slender hands, dangling loosely, still twitched from their recent
exertions, and from time to time, he turned the palms outward, with an
impatient gesture. Maurice wished himself alone. He was not at ease
under this new companionship that had thrust itself upon him; indeed, a
strong mental antagonism was still uppermost in him, towards the moody
creature at whose heels he followed; and if, at this moment, he had
been asked to give voice to his feelings, the term "crazy idiot" would
have been the first to rise to his lips.

Suddenly, without turning, or slackening his pace, Krafft commenced to
speak: at first in a low voice, as if he were thinking aloud. But one
word gave another, his thoughts came rapidly, he began to gesticulate,
and finally, wrought on by the beauty of the night, by this choice
moment for speech, still excited by his own playing, and in an infinite
need of expression, he swept the silence before him with the force of a
flood set free. If he thought Maurice were about to interrupt him, he
made an imploring gesture, and left what he was saying unfinished, to
spring over to the next theme ready in his brain. Names jostled one
another on his tongue: he passed from Beethoven and Chopin to Berlioz
and Wagner, to Liszt and Richard Strauss--and his words were to Maurice
like the unrolling of a great scroll. In the same breath, he was with
Nietzsche, and Apollonic and Dionysian; and from here he went on to
Richard Dehmel, to ANATOL, and the gentle "Loris" of the early verses;
to Max Klinger, and the propriety of coloured sculpture; to PAPA HAMLET
and the future of the LIED. Maurice, listening intently, had fleeting
glimpses into a land of which he knew nothing. He kept as still as a
mouse, in o