Madame Capriani tried several times unsuccessfully to check her husband, and Fritz looked gloomily down into his empty plate.
He had always been so proud of his Schneeburg, and that it should not be good enough for this swindler, forsooth!----
Fermor looked discontented, and talked to Adeline about his compositions, betraying at every word the sentimental arrogance of a narrow-minded, lackadaisical, provincial aristocrat, greedy for adulation, and salving his conscience for his new associations, by making himself as disagreeable as possible to the people whose bread he eats.
Malzin, albeit in a subordinate position, manifested from habit the instinctive reserve of a true gentleman, fearful of wounding the susceptibilities of his inferiors. The conduct of his fellows was in striking contrast to his own. Fermor ignored him. Kilary on the contrary continually tried to draw him into familiar talk upon subjects of which none of the others knew anything, a course evidently irritating to the host.
Malzin was, moreover, the only one at table towards whom Kilary conducted himself courteously. To the poet he was especially insolent. At dessert he read aloud with sentimental emphasis a couple of bonbon-mottoes, and then asked, "My dear Orchis, are these immortal lines your own?" at which the poet vainly tried to smile. The rumour ran that when his finances were at a low ebb he did sometimes place his genius at the disposal of a Vienna confectioner.
After dinner the gentlemen retired to the smoking-room to smoke, the ladies to the drawing-room to yawn.
"I cannot cease looking at you, this evening, Comtesse," Charlotte Malzin exclaimed, seating herself on a sofa beside the daughter of the house, "your gown is enchanting."
"Very much too picturesque for this part of the world, they can't appreciate these contrasts of colour in this barbarous country," Ad'lin said crossly, as she was wont to receive the actress's advances. "They are far behind the age in Austria! _Dieu, qui l'Autriche m'ennuie!_"
The actress fell silent, in some confusion.
"What had the poet to say to you, Ad'lin?" asked the Baroness Melkweyser, after she had inspected through her eye-glass each piece of furniture in turn in the drawing-room.