Henriette had coiled herself up on a low cushioned seat, and, clasping her hands around her knees, said, sharply, "Dearest Moritz, I pray you do not take quite so much state upon yourself; you might provoke some old mistress of these walls to awaken and see her grand successor and lord of the castle making coffee, while the castle dame reclines comfortably, smoking cigarettes. Oh, how she would stare!"
Flora did not stir a hair's-breadth from her position: she only took the cigarette slowly from between her lips, and asked, in a tone of assumed indifference, as she knocked off the ashes with her third finger, "Does it annoy you, my dear?"
"Me?" Henriette turned towards her with a hard laugh. "You know I am never annoyed by the freaks and follies of your genius, Flora; the world is wide: it is easy to avoid"——
"Hush! don't be so bitter, child. I asked from the purest sympathy for your poor chest."
The flitting crimson came and went upon the invalid's thin cheek, and tears glittered in her eyes, but she controlled herself. "Thanks; but expend your care first upon yourself, Flora. I know how your every fibre is longing to throw that smoky thing out of the window, for it discolours your white teeth like meerschaum, and sends a perpetual shiver of disgust through you, and yet you persist in the heroic self-subjugation. From a mania for the emancipation of woman? Pshaw! you have far too much taste, Flora, to have recourse to such distinctive signs of a blue-stocking, and you certainly would not sacrifice beauty to a rage for public glorification and applause——"
"See what a lofty opinion the dear creature entertains of me," Flora said to the councillor, shaking her head, and laughing ironically.
"You are practising smoking, and will probably continue to do so for three or four weeks longer," Henriette continued, undeterred, but with evident irritation, "because there are people who detest like the breath of the plague the odour of tobacco from a woman's mouth. You are trying to offend; this is your latest attempt to——"
Flora raised herself from her reclining posture. "And if it is, Fräulein Henriette?" she asked, with an air of lofty disdain. "Is it not my affair, solely, whether I choose to attract or repel?"
"Not at all. Your only duty in this case is to please," Henriette declared, with vehemence.
"Nonsense! There is no marriage ring here yet." And she pointed to the third finger of her left hand. "Thank God, no! And you of all others should be the last to lay a lance in rest in this cause. You are ill, poor child, and more than ever dependent upon your physician; but he prefers to take a pleasure-trip, and to remain weeks away perhaps, assigning no reason for his absence."