"Do you know what? Get yourself exiled to Russia and throw bombs. Go to a pest-house and wash sores. Marry a drunkard, who will beat you and sell your bed from under your body. _Don't_ become a teacher--not _you_."
"I will tell you why. A flat-breasted person with watery eyes and falling hair who can only see one side of a subject--such a creature should be a teacher. Somebody without the blood and nerve to live his own life can teach others to live--he's good enough for that. But he whose blood flows through his body like fluid fire, whose yearning spurts from his eyes, to whom the problems of life exist for seeing and knowing, not for paltry criticism, he who--but I mustn't talk to you about that, though I should very much like to."
"And already a woman." His eyes scanned her in pained admiration. "Look at me," he continued. "I, too, was once a human being--you wouldn't believe it--I, too, once stretched two sturdy arms longingly to heaven; I, too, once looked with desire into a girl's eyes, though not into such as yours. Let me prattle. A dying man can do no harm."
"But you shall not die," she cried, jumping from her seat.
"Sit down, child, and don't excite yourself about me. It doesn't pay. A friend of mine once broke the back-bone of a cat that had gone mad. He did it with one blow of a stick. The cat couldn't run away, she couldn't howl, she couldn't do anything but just remain on all fours and cough and choke and cough and choke--until the second blow came. That's the way it is with me. There's nothing to be done. Go away, child, I've already made my peace, but when I look at you my heart grows heavy again."
Lilly turned her face away to hide her tears.
"Must?" He laughed again. "I shall feed on every minute of your presence as a hungry man feeds on the crumbs he digs out of his pockets. You sat on the left end of the first bench. I remember. I said to myself, 'What a pair of improbable eyes! Such eyes the magic dogs of Andersen's tales must have, eyes to which you would like to say, Please don't make such big eyes. And from being thought big, they grow still bigger and bigger.'"
"You see," he said, "I have made you merry again. You must not carry away too deathlike a picture from here. Our lessons were beautiful, weren't they?"