Many people declared that she was not beautiful, only distinguished in appearance. In fact, she was both to an astonishing degree, and aristocratic to her finger-tips. Tall, slender almost to emaciation, with long, narrow hands and feet, a head proudly erect, and sharply-cut features, her carriage was inimitable, her walk grace itself. Wherever she went she attracted universal attention. She wore her fair hair short in close curls about her small head, a piece of audacity indeed, and she talked quickly in a rather high voice, and with a slight defect in her utterance, characteristic of the royal family to which she was related, and which made some people nervous, while her countless adorers declared it enchanting.
However, beautiful or not, she had been a leader in Berlin society for two years, and would brook no rival near her throne.
The evening ran its course; the servants opened the doors into the dining-hall; the ladies took their places at small tables, while the gentlemen served them--the entertainment being but meagre--before satisfying their own appetites. Some of them performed this duty with skill and dexterity, while others rattled plates and glasses and invariably dropped something.
Erika, paler than usual, with sparkling eyes and very red lips, sat at a table with a charmingly fresh young girl about her own age, but ten years younger intellectually. Nevertheless the child's development might almost be said to be finished, while Erika's had scarcely passed its first stage. She had honestly tried to talk with this companion, but without success; nor had she much to say to the young men who, attracted by her beauty, thronged around her. Reaction had set in: her enjoyment of her triumph had been succeeded by a strange restlessness.
Dorothea von Sydow was sitting near by at a table with one of the most fashionable women in Berlin, an Austrian diplomat, an officer of cuirassiers, and one of her cousins, Prince Helmy Nimbsch. All five had remarkably good appetites and talked incessantly. In their midst sat Frau von Geroldstein, a vacant place on each side of her,--solemn and mute. No one knew her, no one spoke to her, but she was sitting among people of rank and was content. Her only regret was that she had mistaken the continuance of the court mourning by a day, and had consequently appeared in a plain black gown in an assemblage of women in full dress with feathers and diamonds in their hair. To justify her error she had hastily trumped up a story of the death of a near relative.
Goswyn's place was with the elder women, a distinction that frequently fell to his share. He looked grave and anxious, and Countess Lenzdorff, who had commanded his presence at her table, with her usual imperiousness, reproached him for being tiresome and bad-tempered. From time to time he glanced towards Erika, of whom he could see nothing save a slender neck with a knot of gold-gleaming hair, a little pink ear, and now and then the outline of a softly-rounded cheek.
Yes, she was bewitching, there was no denying it, but she must be insufferable, there was no doubt of that either. The idea of thus making a show of a girl scarcely eighteen! It was in such bad taste: it was absolutely unprincipled: the old Countess, in her senseless vanity, was doing the child a positive injury. At times a kind of rage half choked him: he could have shaken his old friend, to whom he had been as a son, and who had from his boyhood petted him far more than her own child. Again he glanced towards Erika. Then his thoughtful gaze wandered across to the round table where his sister-in-law was sitting. She looked particularly well in a dress of white velvet with an antique Spanish necklace of emeralds around her slender neck. It was all very lovely, but her short hair was not in harmony with it.
Beside her sat her cousin, Prince Helmy Nimbsch, a good-tempered dandy, scarcely twenty-five years old, with large light-blue eyes and a face smoothly shaven, except for a moustache. As Goswyn looked at Thea, she was laughing at her cousin over the champagne-glass which she held to her lips. Her eyes were her greatest beauty,--large hazel eyes, but with no soul in them, no expression, not even a bad one. Her charm was entirely physical, but it was very great. It was a pity that her manners were so loud. That perpetual giggle of hers rasped Goswyn's nerves. But he was alone in his dislike: her adorers were legion.
He looked away from her. Where was his brother? Over in a corner, at a table without ladies, he was sitting with another gentleman. Fortunately he had found a man who was even more uncomfortable than himself in this brilliant assemblage.
This was Herr Geroldstein, husband of the ambitious dame, a pale little man with a bald head and mutton-chop whiskers, who looked for all the world like a man who had wielded a yard-stick behind a counter all his life long,--a decent enough little man, with an air of being perpetually ashamed of himself, who never made use for his own part of the title which he had purchased as a birthday-present for his wife. He spoke very softly and ate and drank but little, while Otto von Sydow did both with great gusto, now and then uttering some oracular remark as to the best wine-merchant in Rheims. His face was redder than usual, and produced the impression of rude health beside the pale tradesman who had passed his life in his office. There was in Goswyn's opinion no denying that no man in the room was as ill fitted to be the husband of the slender Princess Dorothea as was his brother Otto.