"Certainly," Wolff assented. "Such a lovely creature! I know no girl more beautiful in all Nuremberg."
"Oh! you——," said his betrothed bride, shaking her finger at her lover, but he answered promptly,
"You just told me that you preferred 'good' to 'better,' and so doubtless 'fair' to 'fairer,' and you are beautiful, Els, in person and in soul. As for Eva, I admire, in pictures of madonnas and angels, those wonderful saintly eyes with their uplifted gaze and marvellously long lashes, the slight droop of the little head, and all the other charms; yet I gladly dispense with them in my heart's darling and future wife. But you, Els—if our Lord would permit me to fashion out of divine clay a life companion after my own heart, do you know how she would look?"
"Like me—exactly like Els Ortlieb, of course," replied the girl laughing.
"A correct guess, with all due modesty," Wolff answered gaily. "But take care that she does not surpass your wishes. For you know, if the little saint should meet at the dance some handsome fellow whom she likes better than the garb of a nun, and becomes a good Nuremberg wife, the excess of angelic virtue will vanish; and if I had a brother—in serious earnest—I would send him to your Eva."
"And," cried Els, "however quickly her mood changes, it will surely do her no harm. But as yet she cares nothing about you men. I know her, and the tears she shed when our father gave her the costly Milan suckenie, in which she went to the ball, were anything but tears of joy."
[Suckenie—A long garment, fitting the upper part of the body closely and widening very much below the waist, with openings for the arms.]
"I only wonder," added Wolff, "that you persuaded her to go; the pious lamb knows how to use her horns fiercely enough."
"Oh, yes," Els assented, as if she knew it by experience; then she eagerly continued, "She is still just like an April day."
"And therefore," Wolff remarked, "the dance which she began with tears will end joyously enough. The young knights and nobles will gather round her like bees about honey. Count von Montfort, my brother-in-law Siebenburg says, is also at the Town Hall with his daughter."