Countess Mühlberg, who had been stretching her delicate neck to listen, replied, "About love."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Count Treurenberg, springing up from his seat: "I must hear what the fellow has to say." And, followed shortly afterwards by Constance Mühlberg, he joined the circle about the black-bearded seer.
Erika remained sitting with Fräulein Agatha on the sofa beneath the palm. They could hear the seer's drawling voice as he announced very distinctly, "Love is the instinctive desire of an individual for union with a certain individual of the opposite sex."
Fräulein von Horn meditatively smoothed her gray hair with one of her long knitting-needles, and said, carelessly, "I know that definition: it is Max Norden's." Whereupon she left her seat beside Erika to devote herself to the three artists, her protégés.
Erika was left entirely alone under the palm, in a state of angry discontent. Never before, wherever she had been, had she been so little regarded. She was of no more importance here than Fräulein Agatha,--hardly of as much. For the first time it occurred to her that under certain circumstances it was quite inconvenient to be unmarried.
At the same time she was conscious of a great disappointment: she had not come hither to study the Baroness Neerwinden's eccentricities, or to listen to Minona von Rattenfels's love-plaints: she had come---- What, in fact, had she come for?
From the other end of the room came the seer's voice: "The only strictly moral union is founded upon elective affinity."
"Very true!" exclaimed Frau von Neerwinden.
A short pause followed. The servants handed about refreshments. Rosenberg, the black-bearded seer, stood with his left elbow propped upon the back of his friend Minona's chair; in his right he held his opera-hat.
A French littérateur, who had understood enough of the whole performance to be jealous of his German colleague, began to proclaim his view of love: "L'amour est une illusion, qui--que----" There he stuck fast.