'Indeed?' said I.
'When I was a boy,' he said this morning, 'I read at school of a young woman—a mythological person—called Hebe.'
'She was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,' said I.
'It may be,' he said. 'The parentages of the mythological period are curiously intricate. But why is it, dear Fräulein Schmidt, that though I can recollect nothing of her but her name, whenever I see you you remind me of her?'
Now was not that very pleasant? Hebe, the restorer of youth to gods and men; Hebe, the vigorous and wholesome. Thoreau says she was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and that whenever she came it was spring. No wonder I was pleased.
'Perhaps it's because I'm healthy,' said I.
'Is that it?' he said, obviously fumbling about in his brain for the reason. And when he got to the house he displayed the results of his fumbling by saying, 'But many people are healthy.'
'Yes,' said I; and left him to think it out alone.
So now there are two nice young women I've been compared to—you once said I was like Nausicaa, and here a year later, a year in which various rather salt and stinging waves have gone over my head, is somebody comparing me to Hebe. Evidently the waves did me no harm. It is true on the other hand that Papa Lindeberg is short-sighted. It is also true that last night I found a beautiful shining silvery hair insolently flaunting in the very front of my head. 'Yes, yes, my dear,' said Papa—my Papa—when I showed it him, 'we are growing old.'
'And settled. And objective,' said I, carefully pulling it out before the glass. 'And yet, Papachen, inside me I feel quite young.'