Oefel was wedged in between Beata and the Swooning Sister; Gustavus sat opposite to them between two little witty ladies: but he forgot the neighborhood of his arms in that of his eyes. From Oefel's limbs shot sparks of wit, as if the silk in which he was enclosed helped electrize him. The Swooning Sister was so sure of her liege lordship over him, that she counted it no violation of allegiance, if her vassal said to Beata, his next-plate neighbor, the sweetest things; "He will," she thought, "be vexed enough, that out of politeness he cannot do otherwise." As to Herr von Oefel, he was concerned at bottom about nothing except Herr von Oefel; he praised, not in order to display his regard, but only his wit and taste; he suppressed neither flatteries nor satires, when they were good and groundless; he censured women, because he wanted to prove that he saw through them, and because he held that to be a difficult matter; and I held him to be a fool.
He generally applied to a maiden's heart three mountain-borers, in order to drill a hole into it, where he might insert the gunpowder with which he proposed to blow the mineralized vein of love into the air. His first mining-pit which he to-day, as always, loaded in the female heart, in the case of Beata, was, to talk with her a long time about her dress--it is all one to them, he asserted, whether one talks of their limbs or their clothes; but I affirm, the ugly woman wears her dress as her _fruit_, the coquette as the mere _garden-ladder_ or the _fruit-gatherer_, and the good woman as the protecting _foliage_, Beata, like Eve, wore hers as leaf-work.
Secondly, he set up around Beata the cloth-and-yarn-walls of metaphor, in order to chase her into them--he asserted that maidens would _sing_ what they never would say, (like those who cease to stutter the moment they begin to sing); thus they suffer in figures and allegories all those confessions of their inner being to be wormed out of them, which one could never bring from them with literal words, although they meant the same thing--I, on the contrary assert that such women are good-for-nothings, and that those who are worth as much as Beata cannot be caught with words, because their thoughts are never worse than their words. Of course, from a chamber (or heart) where there is fire and smoke within, the flame will blaze out through the first opening you make for it.