"Will you not accompany me part of the way?"
"No, I thank Your Majesty."
"Then I shall see you to-morrow. Good-night. Let us be good neighbors."
The queen left.
Gunther well knew how the ladies of the court would discuss his wife's great breach of decorum in declining to comply with the queen's expressed wish. But he did not say a word to his wife about it, for he knew that he could permit her to have her own way. He felt sure that she would always do what was right, and that, if she did disregard certain conventionalities, she would nevertheless manage everything for the best. Indeed, the very fact of her having gently repelled the queen's exceedingly gracious advances, was doubly reassuring to him.
"I am glad," said Madame Gunther to her husband, when they were together in the drawing-room, "that Paula becomes introduced to court life while yet in her father's house. The queen really impresses me as a noble creature."
Gunther assented, and added that Paula had already proven how well she had profited by Bronnen's advice. For Bronnen had told her that, in order to be free at court, one must make its trifling forms a sort of second nature, so that they can be practiced without special stress or difficulty; and that, in fact, they must be mastered just as one masters the grammar of his native tongue.
In the silent moonlight night, Paula was heard singing, with full voice and passionate expression, the concluding verses of the song of Goethe's, the song that Bronnen admired above all others:
Crown of existence,
Joy without rest,