"Leo, are you satisfied with me?" murmured a melancholy, wistful voice at this moment in his ear, and a strong perfume enveloped him.
He started. He was almost choked by anger, and was obliged to put the utmost restraint on himself not to hurl some coarse epithet at the head of her who bent over him with a resigned smile, as if she were a lamb going to the slaughter.
"If you want to be praised, go to your husband," he said roughly; and then he stood up to take his leave.
XVII
A few days after Leo's first visit to Uhlenfelde, which had been kept a secret, Frau von Stolt of Stoltenhof had invited some of her particularly intimate friends and acquaintances to an afternoon coffee. The Kletzingks had accepted, and, as it happened that both the young cuirassier officers had come home on eight days' leave after the autumn man[oe]uvres, several county families, with grown-up daughters and nieces, had been added to the party at the last minute. This was done at the request of the master of the house; the wily old fox, having been for more than a year on the trail of Felicitas, wished thus conveniently to rid himself of the rivalry of his sons.
The ladies had seated themselves in the small salon with the grass-green paper, on which a collection of racehorses, framed in polished light oak, formed a kind of brown-rimmed lattice-work dado. The large entrance-hall, the pride of the house, with its wooden galleries and mighty chandeliers of stag's antlers, was reserved for the gentlemen. Felicitas von Kletzingk, to-day attired in a black silk dress, which transformed her usually dégagée charms into a sedate matronliness, sat on the right of the worthy Frau von Sembritzky, reclining in the depths of the capacious sofa of honour, covered with green plush, which formerly she had flown from as if it had been a veritable trap. Now she was following with sincere sympathy the complaints which the ladies, all heads of large households, were pouring out to each other. Her mass of fair curly hair, that she was wont to frizz out in the wildest fashion, was smoothly brushed back from her brow, and a modest gold chain surrounded the high plain collar of her dress.
The conversation, suitably to the season, turned on preserving. Frau von Neuhaus of Zubowen, a rotund sexagenarian with a greenish fringe-net over her tousled hair, had tried the new steam apparatus, and had found it, in spite of its apparent advantages, thoroughly unpractical. The Baroness von Krassow opposed this view in an exaggerated fatigued voice; and old Frau von Sembritzky, who, since the marriage of her son with little Meta Podewyl, was doing her very best to revive the tradition with regard to wicked mothers-in-law, glared about her wrathfully like a teased vulture through the bars of its cage, as if she suspected that some one cherished the design of ousting her from the seat of honour. Meta sat next her; the poor young thing pressed the old termagant's hand in hers in nervous awe, while, with a longing smile that threatened every minute to become tearful, she glanced across at the table for "young girls" from which she was banished for ever.
The hostess herself had taken a place to the left of Felicitas. Bolt upright and stiff as a grenadier she sat there, and, though smiling down amiably on her neighbour, she kept watch that no stolen glances were exchanged between her and the gentlemen in the next room.
But even Frau von Stolt had not the smallest fault to find to-day with the much-abused young woman. She appeared charmed with the conversation, and, like a pupil thirsting for knowledge, she put in shy little questions in the pauses. Only now and then did she cast a wandering look along the collection of famous racehorses. No one noticed how her arms stiffened as if with cramp, and her fingers clasped and unclasped convulsively. She had dared much, and the next few minutes would be pregnant with events.
The ladies from Halewitz, as an understood thing, had not been invited. For the last two years every hostess in the neighbourhood had known that a meeting between Felicitas and any member of the Sellenthin family was something to be avoided. Otherwise the table consecrated to the young would have been less quiet, and enlivened by Hertha's sharp repartees.