That the beautiful Fräulein was her cousin did indeed seem strange to her. At first she laughed at the idea, as if it were all a joke; then she blushed crimson, no one knew why, stood up suddenly, made her father a stiff courtesy, and hurried out of the room.
With a sigh the baron left the old man's lodgings, to go and give his old companion-in-arms, Schnetz, an account of this unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation.
Ever since the wedding evening the lieutenant, too, had felt himself in a misanthropic and depressed state of mind, which kept him at home for months and made him forget Paradise utterly; all the more readily because it seemed to him that Jansen's presence there was necessary to its very existence. His artistic talent was, after all, merely the shadow cast by his character when it chanced to stand in a humorous light. He had taken up with the artists because their society seemed to him more tolerable than any other that came within the great dreariness of his ordinary life, less because they created beautiful works than because they were men who were capable of producing something that lay beyond the pale of ordinary society, for which he had a profound contempt. Even they did not escape his Thersites mood. But the fact that he had discovered one among them at whom he found it absolutely impossible to rail, and whom he had not the heart to ridicule even with his black art, had inspired him with a strange feeling toward Jansen; as though, if the whole decaying world should fall to pieces and leave only this one man, nothing would really be lost, and the human race, copied after this model, would be restored to a far higher grandeur. He had really _loved_ this man, carefully as he tried to conceal such "sentimentalities" from every one, especially from himself. And now he sat alone again in his Timonian bitterness, cutting silhouettes in the dark, and angry with all other men because all of them taken together could not compensate him for the loss of this one.
He received the baron exceedingly badly, listened to his account of his unloving child with a sardonic grin, and assured him that the only consolation he found in this whole muddle of a world was that there were still a few beings left, even of the female sex, who would not let themselves be fooled by fine words, and who spoke out just what they thought. He advised him to go to Africa and shoot a lioness, and adopt her brood, whereupon he immediately began to cut out the baron in black paper as the nurse of a wildcat, that he might give him a memento to take with him on his journey.