They all fell to guessing who the authoress could be. The Captain alone looked sad, and said nothing. I know not whether from sorrow at the recollection of his first lost son, or because he thought as I, in fact, do about the whole affair. I conjecture, namely, that the lost Guido is just his own child; and the correspondent is the beloved whom the commercial agent Röper had wrested out of his hands. I shall give my reason, by and by. Gustavus's beauty may be demonstrated, either _a priori_ (by reasoning downward from cause to effect) or, secondly, by a reverse process, from consequent to antecedent. His forcing-house, in which he was trained and hidden, very naturally bleached his lily-skin to a white ground on which two pale cheek-roses, or only their reflection and the darker and denser rosebud of the upper lip had lighted. His eye was the open heaven which you happen upon in a thousand cases of five-year-old children, and only in ten of people fifty years old; and this eye was, moreover, veiled or beautified by long eye-lashes, and by a somewhat dreamy and enthusiastic haze. Finally, neither exertion nor passion had struck their marking-axe and its sharp letters into this fair tree, nor had the death sentence which was to announce its fall, been cut into its bark. But all beauty is soft, hence, the fairest people are the most tranquil; hence, violent labor distorts poor children and poor races.
But the year has not yet come, in which I can prove the beauty of Gustavus by the _a posteriori_ process.
For as the auctioneer was at that time my most intimate friend, he executed for my pleasure the little trick of setting up for sale the paintings and engravings precisely on a day, when, on account of the masquerade, not a soul of the great world of Unterscheerau came out to the auction, I, alone, excepted; as expiatory payment for the same, I had to endure a thousand things. The whole town and suburb had contributed to this rubbish-heap of furniture, and was seller and buyer at once. In this auction appeared all European potentates, but wretchedly drawn and colored; and a nobleman of _bon sens_ set up his two parents and was fain to pass them off as good knee-pieces (or half-length portraits);--in Rome, inversely, parents sold their children, only _in naturâ_. The nobleman hoped I would bid on his papa and mamma; but I overbade on nothing, except the portrait of Gustavus, which was knocked off to me. The nobleman was named Röper, of whom I have mentioned above, that he on one and the same day became husband and step-father.