"What diabolical weather!" cried Cyprian, entering the last. "In spite of my cloak I am nearly wet through, and a gust of wind all but carried away my hat."
"And it won't be better very soon," said Ottmar; "for our meteorologist, who lives in the same street with me, has prognosticated very fine weather at the end of this autumn."
"Right; you are perfectly right, my friend Ottmar," Vincenz said. "Whenever our great prophet consoles his neighbours with the announcement that the winter is not going to be at all severe, but principally of a southerly character, everybody rushes away in alarm, and buys all the wood he can cram into his cellar. The weather-prophet is a wise and highly-gifted man, whom we can thoroughly trust, so long as we expect the exact reverse of what he predicts."
"Those autumnal storms always make me thoroughly wretched," said Sylvester; "I always feel depressed and ill whilst they are going on; and I think you feel the same, Theodore."
"Oh, indeed I do," answered Theodore; "this sort of weather always makes----"
"Splendid!--delightful beginning of a meeting of the Serapion Club!" intercalated Lothair. "We set to work to discuss the weather, like a parcel of old women round the coffee-table."
"I don't see," said Ottmar, "why we should not talk about the weather; the only reason you can object to it is that talking about it seems to be an observance of a kind of rather slovenly old custom, which has resulted from a necessity to say something or other when there happens to be nothing else in people's minds to talk about. What I think is that a few words about the weather and the wind make a very good beginning of a conversation, whatsoever its nature may turn out to be, and that the very universality of the applicability of this as the beginning of a conversation prove how natural it really is."
"As far as I am concerned," said Theodore, "I don't think it matters a farthing how a conversation commences. But there is one thing certain--that, if one wants to make some very striking and clever beginning, that is enough to kill all the freedom and unconstraint which may be termed the very soul of conversation. I know a young man--I think he is known to you all, as well--who is by no means deficient in that mobility of intellect which is absolutely necessary for good conversation; but he is so tormented, particularly when ladies are present, by that kind of eagerness to burst out with something brilliant and striking at the very outset of a talk, that he walks restlessly about the room; makes the most extraordinary faces in the keenness of his inward torment; opens his lips, and--cannot manage to utter a syllable."
"Cease, cease, base wretch!" Cyprian cried, with comic pathos, "do not, with murderous hand, tear open wounds which are barely healed. He is speaking of me," he continued, laughing, "and he doesn't know that, a few weeks ago, when I insisted on restraining that tendency of mine, which I see the absurdity of, and falling into a conversation in the ordinary style of other people, I had to pay for it by complete annihilation. I prefer telling you all about this myself to letting Ottmar do it, and add witty comments of his own. At a tea-party where Ottmar and I were, there was present a certain pretty and clever lady, as to whom you are in the habit of maintaining that she interests me more than is right and proper. I went to talk to her, and I admit that I was a little at a loss how exactly to begin, and she was wicked enough to gaze at me with questioning eyes. I burst out with 'The new moon has brought a nice change of weather.' She answered, very quietly: 'Oh, are you writing the Almanac this season?'"
The friends laughed heartily.