“Why, certainly; before daylight.”
“That is to say,” said Christian, smiling, “a little before noon.”
“You calumniate our sun,” said the lieutenant; “it will rise in seven or eight hours from this time.”
“Well, then, let’s go to bed.”
“To bed!” cried M. Goefle; “already? The punch wouldn’t let you sleep, even then. I’m only beginning to recover from my emotion over Stangstadius’s wig. Let me have time to breathe, Christian. I thought you were better company. You are not at all merry to-night, do you know?”
“I confess it; I am as melancholy as an Englishman,” said Christian.
“Why so, nephew? for I shall insist upon it in private that you are my nephew, though I so shamefully disowned you in public. What makes you melancholy?”
“I don’t know at all, my dear uncle, unless it is that I am beginning to turn into a mountebank.”
“Explain your aphorism.”
“I have been travelling with my marionettes three months; it is too long. At another period of my life, which I have described to you, I followed the same occupation for about that time, and I felt—though in a less degree, for I was younger—the same result as now. I have moments of great excitement, but my spirits are correspondingly low afterwards; I think of my work with disgust and indifference; when actually performing, I am carried away by a feverish play of fancy, a sort of overflow of gayety or emotion; and as soon as I take off my mask and become an ordinary person again, I am overwhelmed with despondency and self-contempt.”