Now the dance was to begin again, it seemed. The mail clerk revealed an all-embracing activity. He hurried around and invited every one to engage partners, pushed and cleared away chairs and glasses with the aid of the waiter, gave orders to the musicians, and took some awkward ones, who did not know where to go, by the shoulders and pushed them along before him. What were they going to do? Groups of eight couples were forming sets ... A terrible memory made Tonio Kröger blush. They were dancing the quadrille.
The music began, and the couples bowed and marched past each other. The mail clerk called the figures, and he did so, by heaven, in French, and brought out the nasal sounds in an incomparably distinguished fashion. Ingeborg Holm was dancing right in front of Tonio Kröger, in the set just next to the door. She moved back and forth in front of him, forward and backward, gliding and whirling; a perfume that came from her hair or the dainty stuff of her dress reached him occasionally, and he shut his eyes with a feeling that had been so familiar to him all his life, whose aroma and bitter stimulus he had faintly discerned all these last days, and that now filled him again completely with its sweet distress. What _was_ it? Longing? Tenderness? Envy, self-contempt?... _Moulinet des dames!_ Did you laugh, blond Inga, did you laugh at me when I danced _moulinet_ and made such a pitiable fool of myself? And would you laugh today, now that I have after all become something like a famous man? Yes, you would, and you would have thrice as much right as before! And if I, all by myself, had created the Nine Symphonies, The World as Will and Idea, and the Last Judgment--still you would be eternally justified in laughing ... He looked at her, and a line occurred to him which he had long forgotten, and yet was so familiar and so akin to him: "I fain would sleep, but thou must dance." He knew so well the deep, clumsy, melancholy Scandinavian awkwardness of feeling that was expressed by it. To sleep ... To long to live simply and wholly for the feeling that sweetly and indolently satisfies itself, without the obligation of becoming a deed and a dance--and nevertheless to dance, to have to execute nimbly and with presence of mind the hard, hard and dangerous knife-dance of art, without ever quite forgetting the humiliating contradiction that lay in having to dance while one was in love ...