The student did not hide her liking for the actor.  His shabby appearance filled her with confidence.  The area around his internally) almost rotted, true-hearted blue eyes, worn out, as she imagined, by make-up and hopelessness, by excessive whorings or masturbation, gripped her soul.  His being, a mixture of smugness and unashamed aggressiveness, very much excited her.  Amidst the screaming, the waiters, the beer-benches, and the vapors, under the addictive yellow gaslights, she had to call out with rapture, “I’ve never met a man like you before, Mr. Schwertschwanz,” He was so pleased, he touched her.  While a troop of soldiers marching by outside whistled the well-known folk song, “Little Maria, you sweet little creature etc...”

Without a spoken agreement, the lovers, arm-in-arm, moved in the direction of the student’s room when they left the boozy saloon.  Upstairs, Maria Mondmilch laid down, with her legs crossed, on a sleep-sofa near the bookcase.  The actor sank into a soft chair, next to which a small table with an ornate bottle of cognac stood.  Talking was difficult.  Each wanted to sob out to the other how much he or she had suffered from childhood on.  They wanted to gobble each other up, so greedy were they as the minutes went by.  Something stood between them.  The actor drank the cognac.  The student played nervously with her hands and feet.

The actor could no longer bear his agony.  He cried out gently—­it was as though something had been shattered to pieces:  “I shall be frank.  I am syphilitic”—­Some tears rolled down his cheeks.  He was startled by how insincere he was.  The student held her hands in front of her face.  As theatrically as he.  But unconsciously.

He had miscalculated.  Her erotic excitement was out of control.  She wriggled on her sleep-sofa.  She held out her hand to him.  She whispered:  “Poor man, come.”  He did not take her hand.  With lowered eyes, in a face filled with unhappy renunciation, whose effect had been tried out

on many hysterical women, he said:  “You of all people should know that contact with me might give you an infection, although in the last few years my Wasserman test was always negative.”  Then she said heroically:  “Frankness deserves frankness.  I am a virgin.”

Instinctively she had taken vengeance.  He no longer had control of his overwrought senses.  Like a cat he pounced onto the girl in the middle of the sleep-sofa.  Now she fought him off.  Ready, with anxious eyes, to give herself to him.

As they were wrestling the student sang her theme-song:  “I am Maria Mondmilch, the girl, the virgin.  Open your door for me.  You, I tried the surface of many men’s flesh, old men and young.  I tempted them all.  In all of them I sought my man.  No one penetrated me deeper than my skin...  I prowled around during the days.  Ran during the nights.  I slept in the same bed with musicians and aristocrats.  I was with