n, and all of a sudden her
eyes were filled with hate and distrust.

Benda felt sorry for her. This everlasting attempt to make a seductive
gesture, this fishing for words that would convey a double meaning, this
self-betrayal, this excitement about nothing, made him feel sad.
Dorothea did not seem to him a bad woman. Whatever else she might be
accused of, it did not seem to him that she was guilty of downright
immoral practices. He felt that she was merely misguided, poisoned, a
phantom and a fool.

His mind went back to certain Ethiopian women in the very heart of
Africa; he thought of their noble walk, the proud restfulness of their
features, their chaste nudeness, and their inseparability from the earth
and the air.

He nevertheless understood his friend: the musician could not help but
succumb to the charms of the phantom; the lonely man sought the least
lonely of all human beings.

As he was coming to this conclusion, Daniel entered the room. He greeted
Benda, and said to Dorothea: "There is a girl outside who says she has
some ostrich feathers for you. Did you order any feathers?"

"Oh, yes," replied Dorothea hastily, "it is a present from my friend,
Emmy Buettinger."

"Who's she?"

"You don't know her? Why, she is the sister of Frau Feistelmann. You
must help me," she said, turning to Benda, "for you must know all about
this kind of things. There where you have been ostriches must be as
thick as chickens here at home." Laughing, she went out, and returned in
due time with a big box, from which, cautiously and with evident
delight, she took two big feathers, one white, one black. Holding them
by the stem, she laid them across her hair, stepped up to the mirror,
and looked at herself with an intoxicated mien.

In this mien there was something so extraordinary, indeed uncanny, that
Benda could not help but cast a horrified glance at Daniel.

"This is the first time I ever knew what a mirror was," he said to
himself.

III

That evening Daniel visited Benda in his home. Benda showed him some
armour and implements he had brought back with him from Africa. In
explaining some of the more unusual objects, he described at length the
customs of the African blacks.

Then he was seized with a headache, sat down in his easy chair, and was
silent for a long while. He suddenly looked like an old man. The ravages
his health had suffered while in the tropics became visible.

"