"And she replied----?" asked Constance Mühlberg.
The Count fanned himself with his opera-hat with a languishing air, and lisped, "'Ah, oui, Sappho; c'est bien Sappho, toujours la même histoire, after more than two thousand years.'"
"Poor Minona! and to think that she cudgels it all out of her imagination!" Fräulein Agatha remarked, ironically. "She has no more personal experience than--well, than I."
"'Sh!--not so loud," Constance whispered, laughing. "She never would forgive you for betraying her thus."
"I have known her from a child," Fräulein von Horn continued, composedly. "She once exchanged love-letters with her brother's tutor, and since then she has always played the game with a dummy."
The dry way in which she imparted this piece of information was irresistibly comical, but in the midst of the laughter which it provoked a loud voice was heard declaiming at the other end of the room, where, in the midst of a circle of listeners, stood a black-bearded individual with a Mephistophelian cast of countenance, holding forth upon some subject.
"Who is that?" asked Countess Mühlberg.
"I do not know the fellow," said the Count. "Not in my line."
"A writer from Vienna," Fräulein von Horn explained. "He was invited here, that he might write an article upon Minona."
"What is he talking about?" asked the Count.