"But, I repeat, I don't want to pour any wine at all into my glass."
"Stuff and nonsense! We know all about that. Bessy makes a fool of every man, and showers contempt on her worshippers. Of you alone does she always speak with rapture. Whenever your name is mentioned she sighs deeply, and says, 'Ah, and I might have been his, too!'"
"That proves all the more that our relations have been purely Platonic."
"Very good indeed! What I like about you best of all is the serious face with which you are always able to defend your point of view. Another man in your place would rejoice at his good fortune; you nobly deny yourself. You will compromise nobody. You have that advantage over all my other good friends. I would rather entrust her to you than to anybody."
"But why not rather trust her to herself? Foster within her the sentiment of fidelity. Write to her every day from the camp."
"Nay, my friend, a letter won't do. I can't be always scribbling and raving to her. Bessy is not one of the romantic sort. You know all her various temperaments."
"Well, I do then. I know that the moment I've cast my right foot over my horse's back she will be unfaithful to me. It is as much her nature to be so as it is my nature to fight and yours to write. When I can't sit on horseback I'm ill, when you can't write a romance you're ill, and when a pretty woman is not flirting she gets the _migraine_. Your hand upon it that you will visit my Bessy while I am far away and comfort her!" And the tears really started to his eyes.
Now, here was a situation which is not to be found in any romance, and which the reader will, I know, only accept as true under protest. A soldier departing for the wars forcibly compels his good friend to try and comfort the pretty wife he leaves behind him. But that that friend should kick and struggle with all his might against such a marvellous piece of good fortune is a fact which I am sure I shall never get the enlightened public to believe anyhow.
"My friend," said Kvatopil finally, drying the tears from his eyes and violently pressing one of my hands in one of his, "you know that we valiant horsemen, dragoons and uhlans, are going down to Italy; the hussars have gone already. The volunteers will take our place here in garrison-duty. During our absence down there they will be raging furiously here. If I thought that mine would be the shame to see my place here taken by one of those red-braided, chicory hussars, I should be capable of blowing out first my wife's brains and then my own. Don't allow such a thing to happen. If one of those cockatoos were to see your astrachan pelisse with the large chalcedon buttons of yours hanging up in my ante-chamber, he would be scared into flight at once."