'Yours is easy enough to read. It is shining so clearly in your eyes, it is reflected so limpidly in your face—'
'How nice,' said I, interrupting in my turn, for my feet were getting grievously wet; and you note, I hope, with what industriousness I preserve and record anything of a flattering nature that any one ever says to me.
But you shall hear the other side too; for I turned away, and he turned away, and before I had gone a yard my shoelace came undone and I had to go back to the shelter of the porch to tie it up, and while I had my foot on the scraper and was bending down tying a bow and a knot that should last me till I got home I heard Frau von Lindeberg from the parlor off the passage make him the following speech:
'I am constantly surprised, Ludwig, at the amount of time and conversation I see you bestow on Fräulein Schmidt. I can hardly call it impertinence, but there is something indescribable about her manners,—an unbecoming freedom, an almost immodest frankness, an almost naked naturalness, that is perilously near impertinence. People of that class do not understand people of ours; and she will, if you are kinder than is absolutely necessary, certainly take advantage of it. Let me beg you to be careful.'
And Ludwig, beginning then and there, never answered a word.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
What do you think? Papa's book has been refused by the Jena publisher, by three Berlin publishers, by two in Stuttgart, and one in Leipzig. It is now journeying round Leipzig to the remaining publishers. The first time it came back we felt the blow and drooped; the second time we felt it but did not droop; the third time we felt nothing; the fourth time we laughed. 'Foolish men,' chuckled Papa, tickled by such blindness to their own interests, 'if none will have it we will translate it and send it to England, what?'
'Who is we, darling?' I asked anxiously.
'We is you, Rose-Marie,' said Papa, pulling my ear.