Her eyes were closed and she kissed me back. Mine was a marvellous happiness, for I felt that I was her's, vanquished, beaten by her charm. My love was not a conquest, but a capitulation—and yet I was happy.
And now, pity me, compassionate reader, for ... do you know how long my happiness was to last? Fate, cruel, inexorable fate, had allowed me one minute, one single minute. Then a devilish laughter, coming from some hidden corner in the shrubs, awoke me.
Of the old guilds of Vienna one still exists. It is the Company of the Bootmakers. Originally established to afford aid to necessitous members of their trade, the Company by payment of large sums obtained various monopolies. In London there are bootsellers, dealers in boots, which are manufactured in big factories. In Vienna there are still bootmakers. Their Company having from entrance fees, fines, and so on, acquired some money which was employed in the purchase of land, became known, because of the rise in the value of property, to have amassed enormous wealth. The bootmakers are still divided into masters, companions, and apprentices; and so rich is the guild that to be an apprentice bootmaker is sometimes more advantageous than to be a master in another trade. So is the fact explained that you may see walking about in Vienna "bootmakers' lads" aged thirty or forty, very proud of their green aprons.
These "lads" provide one of the many typical figures of Vienna. They are the naughty boys of that city. There is no mischief they will leave undone, if they see a possibility of its performance. There is no cheeky remark they will leave unsaid. They are wasps, and every day a new exploit, or a new bon mot of a bootmakers' lad is told in Vienna.
It was such a lad who came laughing at us out of the shrubbery. I could have thrown myself upon him and given him the thrashing he deserved. But I stopped when I saw him in the moonlight.
He was a little man of about twenty-five. He was lame. He had black hair, a black moustache, and a pointed tuft of black beard on his chin, and with his mocking expression he reminded me of the Frenchman who at Salzburg had made room for ... Mitzi, of the conductor who had united me to ... Mitzi, and of the cabby who had brought me again to ... Mitzi.