While Paul argued with such ardor and earnestness, he was thinking all the time of Fraulein Malvine Marker, the pretty girl with whom he had danced so often, and he fondled tenderly with his right hand the ribbon and cotillion order hidden under his waistcoat.  He did not notice that Wilhelm’s expression of face was painfully distorted, nor that his words wounded him deeply.  They had come to the Brandenburger Thor, and were walking over the Pariser Platz.  Under the lindens they were surrounded at once by noise and bustle.  The streets were full of rowdy bands of men who sang and shouted all together, now pushing one another in violent rudeness, now shouting “Health to the New Year,” here knocking off an angry Philistine’s hat, there surrounding and embracing some honest man who was wearily making his way homeward; insulting the police by imitating their military ways, laying hold of their sticks, talking pompously to the night-watchman, and otherwise playing the fool.  After the silence of the Koniggratzer Strasse, the drunken turmoil of this noisy mob was doubly unpleasant, and the two friends hastened to escape into the Schadowstrasse.  At Wilhelm’s doorstep they took leave of each other; Paul went off humming a snatch of Offenbach up the Friedrichstrasse to his home near the Weidendamme.

Wilhelm was tired, but much too excited to sleep.  He lived over again in thought the last few months, and, as often happened lately, he lapsed into painful meditation on his relations to Loulou.  After her departure from Hornberg she had not written to him for eight days.  Then came a letter from Ostend, in which she called Wilhelm “Sie.”  She said she was very sorry for this, that it would be painful if she called him “Du” and he did not return it, but it would be safer not to do so, as his answer would certainly be read by her mother, and perhaps by her father also, and they would not wish them to say “Du” to each other.  Already this change of tone between them cut Wilhelm to the heart, but almost more still the contents of Loulou’s letter.  She spoke a little of the sea, whose breakers continually sounded in her soul, and her thoughts, which accompanied them like an orchestra; she seldom mentioned the delightful time in the mountains of the Black Forest, which remembrance he carried always with him; but a great deal about the Promenade, the concerts, the Casino balls, her own charming bathing and society toilettes, and those of extravagant Parisians, who tried by incredible mixtures of colors and style to outstrip each other.  She wrote particularly about her acquaintances with celebrated people, and her personal following, and for the rest she hardly missed expressing in any of her letters her regret that he was not with her, and enjoying her varied life.  Often in the letter there was a flower, or a piece of wild thyme, which betrayed an undercurrent of feeling beneath the shallowness of the words, and once she sent him her photograph with the words “Loulou