“You are coming to Sperl’s to-morrow, of course?” said Fritz to Lotta. Now Sperl’s is a great establishment for dancing in the Leopoldstadt, which is always open of a Sunday evening, and which Lotta Schmidt was in the habit of attending with much regularity. It was here she had become acquainted with Fritz. And certainly to dance with Fritz was to dance indeed! Lotta, too, was a beautiful dancer. To a Viennese such as Lotta Schmidt, dancing is a thing of serious importance. It was a misfortune to her to have to dance with a bad dancer, as it is to a great whist-player among us to sit down with a bad partner. Oh, what she had suffered more than once when Herr Crippel had induced her to stand up with him!
“Yes; I shall go. Marie, you will go?”
“I do not know,” said Marie.
“You will make her go, Carl; will you not?” said Lotta.
“She promised me yesterday, as I understood,” said Carl.
“Of course we will all be there,” said Fritz, somewhat grandly; “and I will give a supper for four.”
Then the music began again, and the eyes of all of them became fixed upon Herr Crippel. It was unfortunate that they should have been placed so fully before him as it was impossible that he should avoid seeing them. As he stood up with his violin to his shoulder, his eyes were fixed on Fritz Planken and Fritz Planken’s boots, and coat, and hat, and hair. And as he drew his bow over the strings he was thinking of his own boots and of his own hair. Fritz was sitting, leaning forward in his chair, so that he could look up into Lotta’s face, and he was playing with a little amber-headed cane, and every now and then he whispered a word. Herr Crippel could hardly play a note. In very truth he was wool-gathering. His hand became unsteady, and every instrument was more or less astray.
“Your old friend is making a mess of it to-night,” said Fritz to Lotta. “I hope he has not taken a glass too much of schnapps.”
“He never does anything of the kind,” said Lotta, angrily. “He never did such a thing in his life.”