'You deserve it, certainly. Oh, you are hospitable to the poor. You set pedlars, or mule-drivers, or travelling clockmakers, by the dozen round your hall fires, and you would feed a pilgrimage all the winter long. But to your own order, to your own society, you are inhospitable. In your mother's time the Schloss had two hundred guests for the autumn parties, and then the winter season, from Carnival to Easter, was always spent in the capital.'
'Of course she liked it; everyone ought to like it at what was her age then, and what is yours now.'
'I like this,' said the Countess Wanda, to change the subject, as the servants set a little Japanese tea-table and two arm-chairs of gilt osier-work under one of the Siberian pines, whose boughs spread tent-like over the grass, on which the dogs were already stretched in anticipation of sugar and cakes.
From this lawn there were seen only the old keep of the burg and the turrets and towers of the rest of the building; ivy clambered over one-half of the great stone pile, that had been raised with hewn rock in the ninth century; and some arolla pines grew about it. A low terrace, with low broad steps, separated it from the gardens. A balustrade of stone, ivy-mantled, protected the gardens from the rocks; while these plunged in a perpendicular descent of a hundred feet into the lake. Some black yews and oaks, very large and old, grew against the low stone pillars. It was a favourite spot with the mistress of Hohenszalras; it looked westward, and beyond the masses of the vast forests there shone the snow summit of the Venediger and the fantastic peaks of the Klein and Kristallwand, whilst on a still day there could be heard a low sound which she, familiar with it, knew came from the thunder of the subterranean torrents filling the Szalrassee.
'Oh, it is very nice,' said the Princess, a little deprecatingly. 'And of course I at my years want nothing better than a gilt chair in the sunshine. But then there is so very little sunshine! The chair must generally stand by the stove! And I confess that I think it would be fitter for your years and your rank if these chairs were multiplied by ten or twenty, and if there were some pretty people laughing and talking and playing games in those great gardens.'