"Ugly? I don't find you at all ugly, Zenz. And if you only cared to be a model for me, as you do for Herr Jansen--Do you know, he has kept me for weeks studying an old skeleton and a lay figure, and I am forgetting over such work the very sight of a human being."
She shook her head, laughed, and then said, becoming serious again:
"That was only meant in joke, of course. I am not so simple as to let myself be talked into believing that you are really a sculptor!"
"Well, just as you like, Zenz. I won't try to persuade you to do anything you don't like. Come, take some beer; a new cask has just been broached."
She drank eagerly out of his glass; and then a spirited overture was played which interrupted their conversation for a time. Even after this they talked entirely about other things. She told him about her former life in Salzburg, how strict her mother had been with her, how often she had known want, and how often of a Sunday she had sat quietly in her chamber and had wished she might be allowed, just for once, to join the merry, gayly-dressed throng outside, that she could only look at from a distance. No doubt her mother had really cared for her, but for all that she let her feel that her existence was an eternal reproach and burden to her. Of course she cried when she lost her mother, but her grief did not last long. The pleasure of feeling herself free soon dried her tears. Now, to be sure--all alone as she was, without a soul in all the wide world to trouble itself whether she lived or died--now, she sometimes felt that she would give up everything if she could only be back again at her mother's side.
"That is always the way," concluded she, with a nod of the head that looked droll enough in its seriousness, "one never has what one wants; and still, people say one ought to be contented. Sometimes I wish I were dead. And then again I feel as if I would like to promenade up and down the live-long summer through, wear beautiful dresses, live like a princess, and--"
"And be made love to by a prince--isn't it so?"
"Of course. Alone, one can have no happiness. What would be the use of my princess's dresses, unless I could drive some one perfectly crazy with them?"
He gazed so steadfastly in her eyes, that she suddenly blushed and was silent. The strange mixture of lightheartedness and melancholy in the poor child, of enjoyment of life and reserve, of secret love and introspective moralizing, attracted him more and more. Then, too, the night, the subdued light of the lanterns, and the stirring music, and his own loneliness of heart, and his seven-and-twenty years--