The consequence was that they pressed him to begin issuing his shares and when they gathered round him and asked him to reserve so and so many shares for each, he drew himself up proudly and said they would probably remain in private hands.
At home he was busy designing the new headings for the note paper of the future firm, and the borrowed money jingled in all his pockets.
Four weeks had passed since that midsummer night, when there came from Helenenthal two cards of invitation one for Meyerhofer junior and the other for the young ladies.
“Aha! they court our favor already,” the old man cried, “the rats smell the bacon.”
Paul went with his card--which bore Elsbeth’s hand-writing--behind a haystack, and there studied each letter of it in solitude for wellnigh an hour.
Then he went up to his garret and stood before the looking glass.
He found that his whiskers had grown in fulness and only at the cheeks still showed thin places.
“It will do very well,” he said, in an attack of vanity, but when he saw himself smile he wondered at the deep sad lines which ran from his eyes, past his nose, down to the corners of his mouth.
“Wrinkles make one interesting,” he consoled himself by thinking.
From this hour he exclusively thought about what role he was to play at the party.
He practised before the looking glass making stylish bows, and every morning looked at his Sunday suit, and tried to hide the shabbiness of his coat by brushing some black color over it.
The invitation had caused a great revolution in his mind It was for him a greeting from the promised land of joy, which he, like Moses, had never seen but from afar. It was not for nothing that he was twenty years old.
The day of the party arrived. His sisters had put on their white muslin dresses and fastened dark roses in their hair. They skipped up and down before the looking glass and asked each other, “Am I beautiful?’ And though each willingly replied” Yes,’ to this question, they hardly knew how beautiful they were.
His mother sat in a corner, looked at them and smiled.
Paul ran hither and thither in confusion. He inwardly wondered how such a joyful event could cause one such great anxiety. He had prepared all sorts of beautiful speeches which he intended to hold at the party about the welfare of humanity, about peat-culture, and Heine’s “Buch der Lieder”. They should see that he was able to converse amiably with ladies.