Falbe, on the other hand, lived at his window, ready to hail the passer-by, even as he had hailed Michael, with cheerful words.  There he lounged in his shirt-sleeves, you might say, with elbows on the window-sill; and not from politeness, but from good fellowship, from the fact that he liked people, was at home to everybody.  He liked people; there was the key to it.  And Michael, however much he might be capable of liking people, had up till now given them no sign of it.  It really was not their fault if they had not guessed it.

Two days passed, on the first of which Parsifal was given, and on the second Meistersinger.  On the third there was no performance, and the two young men had agreed to meet in the morning and drive out of the town to a neighbouring village among the hills, and spend the day there in the woods.  Michael had looked forward to this day with extraordinary pleasure, but there was mingled with it a sort of agony of apprehension that Falbe would find him a very boring companion.  But the precepts of Aunt Barbara came to his mind, and he reflected that the certain and sure way of proving a bore was to be taken up with the idea that he might be.  And anyhow, Falbe had proposed the plan himself.

They lunched in a little restaurant near a forest-enclosed lake, and since the day was very hot, did no more than stroll up the hill for a hundred yards, where they would get some hint of breeze, and disposed themselves at length on the carpet of pine-needles.  Through the thick boughs overhead the sunlight reached them only in specks and flakes, the wind was but as a distant sea in the branches, and Falbe rolled over on to his face, and sniffed at the aromatic leaves with the gusto with which he enjoyed all that was to him enjoyable.

“Ah; that’s good, that’s good!” he said.  “How I love smells—­clean, sharp smells like this.  But they’ve got to be wild; you can’t tame a smell and put it on your handkerchief; it takes the life out of it.  Do you like smells, Comber?”

“I—­I really never thought about it,” said Michael.

“Think now, then, and tell me,” said Falbe.  “If you consider, you know such a lot about me, and, as a matter of fact, I know nothing whatever about you.  I know you like music—­I know you like blue trout, because you ate so many of them at lunch to-day.  But what else do I know about you?  I don’t even know what you thought of Parsifal.  No, perhaps I’m wrong there, because the fact that you’ve never mentioned it probably shows that you couldn’t.  The symptom of not understanding anything about Parsifal is to talk about it, and say what a tremendous impression it has made on you.”

“Ah! you’ve guessed right there,” said Michael.  “I couldn’t talk about it; there’s nothing to say about it, except that it is Parsifal.”

“That’s true.  It becomes part of you, and you can’t talk of it any more than you can talk about your elbows and your knees.  It’s one of the things that makes you. . . .”