And so they parted, Rex plunging into a shady side street, while Greif
continued his walk towards the dining-place of his Korps, thinking as
he went, of the queer person he had just seen for the first time. His
name was strange, his conversation was unusual, his eyes were most
disagreeable, and yet oddly fascinating. Greif thought about him and
was not satisfied with his short interview. The man's remark about the
future was either that of a visionary, or of an absent-minded person
who did not always know what he was saying. Greif himself could hardly
understand how he had been led, in a first meeting with one who was
altogether a stranger, to speak so plainly of what disturbed him. It
was not his custom to make acquaintances at a venture, or to refer to
his own affairs with people he did not know. He reflected, however,
that he had not committed himself in any way, while admitting that he
might easily have been drawn on to do so if the interview had been
prolonged.
At dinner he asked his friends whether any of them knew a student whose
name was Rex. No one had heard of him, and on learning that he was a
man older than the average, they murmured, and said one to another that
Greif was beginning to cross the borders of Philistia. After the meal
was over, Greif went to his lodgings and tried to work. The sudden
anxiety that had seized him in the morning during the lecture grew
stronger in solitude, until it was almost unbearable. He pushed aside
his books and wrote to his father, inquiring whether anything had
happened, in a way which would certainly have surprised old
Greifenstein if he himself had been less nervous about the future than
he actually was.
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