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perhaps even more unforgivable offence. However, it is too late to change my mind. I can’t suddenly hand my coat back to the servant as he opens the front door for me with a little bow, I can’t go back into the salon. And so there I am all of a sudden, standing outside that strange, that accursed house, with the cold wind in my face, hot shame in my heart, and breathing as convulsively as if I were being choked.
     
    That was the unfortunate act of folly with which the whole story began. Today, with my blood less agitated and after an interval of many years, when I conjure up the memory of the stupid incident that set everything else in motion I cannot help seeing that I stumbled into this misunderstanding entirely innocently. Even the cleverest and most experienced of men could have committed the faux pas of asking a lame girl to dance. But at the time, under the immediate impression of those first horrified reactions, I seemed to myself not just a hopeless fool but a villain, a criminal. I felt as if I had whipped an innocent child. With a little presence of mind, after all, the entire misunderstanding could have been cleared up. But I realised, as soon as the firstgust of cold air blew in my face outside the house, that by simply running away like a thief in the night, without even trying to apologise, I had made it impossible to retrieve the situation.
    My state of mind as I stood there outside the house is beyond description. I heard no music on the other side of the lighted windows; perhaps the musicians had stopped for a rest. In my overwrought sense of guilt, however, I immediately and feverishly imagined that the dancing had stopped because of me, and everyone was now crowding into the little boudoir next to the salon to comfort the sobbing girl—all the guests, men, women and girls, were unanimously waxing indignant over the conduct of the dastardly man who had asked a crippled girl to dance, only to run away like a coward after committing his offence. And tomorrow—I broke out in a cold sweat; I could feel it under my cap—tomorrow the entire town would know about my disgrace, would be talking about it, passing on the gossip. I saw them all in my mind’s eye, my comrades, Ferencz, Mislyvetz, above all Jozsi the regimental joker, I imagined them coming up to me, smacking their lips with relish. “Well, Toni, what a way to behave! Let you off the leash, and you’ll put the whole regiment to shame!” The mockery and talk would go on for months in the officers’ mess; when old comrades sit at table together they go back over every idiotic act ever committed by one of us again and again, for ten, twenty years, every folly is immortalised, every joke set in stone. Even today, sixteen years after the event, they still tell the sad story of Captain Volinski, who came back from Vienna to boast of meeting Countess T in the Ringstrasse and visiting her in her apartment that very first night. Two days later the newspaper printed the scandalous story of her maid’s dismissal for her confidence tricks, making herself out to be the Countess for the purpose of her own amorous adventures—and what wasmore, the would-be Casanova had to spend three weeks being treated by the regimental doctor. A man who has once looked ridiculous in the eyes of his comrades remains ridiculous for ever; they never forget and never forgive. The more I pictured it, the more I thought about it, the more absurd ideas came into my fevered mind. At that moment it seemed to me a hundred times easier to exert a little quick pressure on the trigger of my revolver than to suffer the infernal torments of the next few days, that helpless waiting to find out whether my comrades had yet heard of my folly, whether the whispering and grinning had already begun behind my back. I knew myself only too well; I knew I would never have the strength to withstand the mockery and scorn and tittle-tattle once it began.
    I don’t remember how I got home that