Whirling along with them in this exultant freedom of his spirit, while his human figure with its oak walking-stick tapped the edge of the pavement, he felt a queer need, now, to carry this maddeningly sweet burden of his to that mound in the Ramsgard cemetery.

“ He would chuckle over this,” thought Wolf, as he recalled that profane deathbed cry. “ He would push me on to snatch most scandalously at this girl, let the result be as it may!”

His mind dropped now like a leaden plummet into all manner of erotic thoughts. Would her silence go on⁠ ⁠… with its indrawing magnetic secrecy⁠ ⁠… even if he were making love to her? Would that glaucous greyness in her eyes darken, or grow more luminous, as he caressed her? Gerda certainly couldn’t be called a “peeled willow-wand,” for her limbs were rounded and voluptuous, just as her face had something of that lethargic sulkiness that is seen sometimes in ancient Greek sculpture.