The children were sent away. Alma Sellien leaned back in the corner of the sofa exhausted, and said, closing her soft blue eyes as it half asleep: "I am sure this will be another disappointment."
"What, dear Alma?" asked Frau Wollnow, whose thoughts were still with her children.
"My husband is so terribly enthusiastic about him; he's always enthusiastic about men I afterwards think horrible."
"You will be mistaken this time," cried Frau Wollnow, who, engrossed in this interesting subject, even failed to hear her youngest child crying upon the stairs; "your husband has said too little rather than too much. He is not only a handsome man--which, for my part, I consider of very little consequence--tall, and of an extremely elegant, graceful bearing, which harmonizes most admirably with the gentle, yet resolute expression of his features, the mild, yet steady gaze of his large deep-blue eyes, and even the soft, but sonorous tone of his voice."
"You are surely turning poetess," said Alma.
Ottilie Wollnow blushed to the roots of the curly bluish-black hair on her temples.
"I don't deny that I am very, very--"
"Much in love with him," said Alma, completing the sentence.
"Why yes, if you choose to say so; that is, as I love everything good and beautiful."
"An excellent theory, which I profess myself, only unfortunately in practice we must always be withheld by the opposition of our husbands. Yours did not seem to be quite so much delighted with your protégé."