What more potent than youth’s wild spirits? At dinner it was impossible to say whether the young people or the old, to whom they had communicated their irrepressible gaiety, were the more intoxicated. What amazing tact and calculation were displayed by the Baron and Baroness von Hohenfels! Well they understood the impressionable and susceptible temperament they had to deal with when they gathered together these gems of their society. Such brilliant eyes and laughing teeth gleaming above the flowers, such whiz of airy and unseizable nothings shot high on the wings of badinage, with the same intangible flavour as the foam of champagne which plentifully drowned them. All seemed specially conspiring to captivate the poor bereaved lover. And so well did they succeed, that he quite forgot Andromache. It was only after dinner, when Mademoiselle Veritassi was invited to sing, and selected something weakly sentimental in French, all about hearts and sighs and tears and parting, that the new-born babe, the infant Cupid, began to clamour and blubber within him. Then he turned aside to think of Andromache. He pressed his head against the window, and stared blankly out upon the hotel gardens drenched with moonlight, the flowers washed of all colour in their bath of silver.
The baron saw him in this doleful attitude, and coming up behind him, held one hand sentimentally upon his heart and the other stretched out, in frantic adjuration to the moon.
“Ma Photini, prépare ta toilette,” he sang.
Rudolph faced him angrily, barely able to restrain the strong exclamation that rushed to his lips.
“No, I have just made better, that is, more appropriate verses. Mademoiselle Natzelhuber is notorious for not greatly caring for dress. Then it is clearly an offence to mention it.”
Rudolph muttered the German equivalent for “bosh,” and walked away.
Has any philosopher deigned to discover the reason why, when a party of young folks start upon a boisterous expedition, and laugh until the woods resound with their mirth, the return to the domestic hearth is generally so silent and so depressed? They are bound to sigh, and look at the stars, or at themselves, in a forlorn and disappointed way, and wonder where and why all their wild enjoyment has vanished.