It is a problem to me to this day how I finally did get into her room. But already I see her hastening toward me with laughter and burying her face in the roses.
"O you spendthrift!" she cries and tears the flowers from my hand in order to pirouette with them before the mirror. And then she assumes a solemn expression and takes me by a coat button, draws me nearer and says: "So, and now you may kiss me as a reward."
I hear and cannot grasp my bliss. My heart seems to struggle out at my throat, but hard before me bloom her lips. I am brave and kiss her. "Oh," she says, "your beard is full of snow."
"My beard! Hear it, ye gods! Seriously and with dignity she speaks of my beard."
A turbid sense of being a kind of Don Juan or Lovelace arises in me. My self-consciousness assumes heroic dimensions, and I begin to regard what is to come with a kind of daemonic humour.
The mist that has hitherto blurred my vision departs. I am able to look about me and to recognise the place where I am.
To be sure, that is a new and unsuspected world—from the rosy silken gauze over the toilet mirror that hangs from the beaks of two floating doves, to the row of exquisite little laced boots that stands in the opposite corner. From the candy boxes of satin, gold, glass, saffron, ivory, porcelain and olive wood which adorn the dresser to the edges of white billowy skirts which hang in the next room but have been caught in the door—I see nothing but miracles, miracles.
A maddening fragrance assaults my senses, the same which her note exhaled. But now that fragrance streams from her delicate, graceful form in its princess gown of pale yellow with red bows. She dances and flutters about the room with so mysterious and elf-like a grace as though she were playing Puck in the "Midsummer Night's Dream," the part in which she first enthralled my heart.
Ah, yes, she meant to get tea.
"Well, why do you stand there so helplessly, you horrid creature? Come! Here is a tablecloth, here are knives and forks. I'll light the spirit lamp in the meantime."