“Oh, don’t!”
“Oh, bah! I know the Elberthal Klatscherei. It has picked me to pieces many a time. After you have partaken to-day of its coffee and its cakes, it will pick you to pieces.”
“But,” said I, arranging the ruffles of my very best frock, which I had been told it was de rigueur to wear, “I thought women never gossiped so much among men.”
Fräulein Sartorius laughed loud and long.
“The men! Du meine Güte! Men at a kaffeeklatsch! Show me the one that a man dare even look into, and I’ll crown you—and him too—with laurel, and bay, and the wild parsley. A man at a kaffee—mag Gott es bewahren!”
“Oh!” said I, half disappointed, and with a very poor, mean sense of dissatisfaction at having put on my pretty new dress for the first time only for the edification of a number of virulent gossips.
“Men!” she reiterated with a harsh laugh as we walked toward the Goldsternstrasse, our destination. “Men—no. We despise their company, you see. We only talk about them directly or indirectly from the moment of meeting to that of parting.”
“I’m sorry there are no gentlemen,” said I, and I was. I felt I looked well.
Arrived at the scene of the kaffee, we were conducted to a bedroom where we laid aside our hats and mantles. I was standing before the glass, drawing a comb through my upturned hair, and contemplating with irrepressible satisfaction the delicate lavender hue of my dress, when I suddenly saw reflected behind me the dark, harshly cut face of Anna Sartorius. She started slightly; then said, with a laugh which had in it something a little forced:
“We are a contrast, aren’t we? Beauty and the Beast, one might almost say. Na! ’s schad’t nix.”