They had met first in Florence. The two brothers had made a tour through Italy just after Otto's attaining his majority. They travelled together so far as that means having the same starting-point and the same goal, but each followed his own devices, stopping where he liked, so that sometimes they did not meet for a long while. While Goswyn underwent all kinds of inconveniences for the sake of visiting many interesting little towns in Northern Italy, Otto, whose first requirement was a good hotel, went directly from Venice to Florence. He had been there for five days, and was terribly bored; he missed Goswyn. Although Otto was the elder of the two, he had always been in the habit of letting Goswyn think for him. Old Countess Lenzdorff maintained that when they were children she had often heard him ask, "Goswyn, am I cold?" "Goswyn, am I hungry?"
He had carried with him through life a certain sense of dependence upon his younger brother, looking to him for help in every difficulty, for support in every sorrow.
He had no acquaintances in Florence, the food was not to his taste, the wine was poor, the beds, in which so many had slept before him, disgusted him, the theatres did not edify him. He took no pleasure in the opera; he was thoroughly--and for a German remarkably--devoid of a taste for music; and the Italian drama he did not understand. Consequently he found his evenings intolerably long: he spoke no Italian, and very little French. Since there were no Germans in the hotel save those with whom, in spite of his homesickness, he did not choose to consort, he led a very lonely life. And, as he took not the slightest interest in art, it was no wonder that on the fifth day of his sojourn in Florence he declared such an "Italian course of culture" the "veriest mockery of pleasure in which a Prussian country nobleman could indulge."
The queerest thing was that Goswyn seemed to be enjoying himself so much. He received delighted post-cards from him from all kinds of little out-of-the-way places of which Otto had never before even heard the names, not even when he studied geography at school, and he seemed entirely independent of discomfort as to his lodgings in his enjoyment of all that "art-stuff," as Otto expressed it to himself.
One afternoon in the cathedral, in an access of most depressing ennui, he was sauntering from one shrine to another, when he suddenly heard a sigh. He looked round. A young girl in a large Vandyke hat and a dark cloth dress trimmed with silver braid had just seated herself in one of the chairs, and was opening a yellow-covered novel. Everything about her, her hat, her dress, as well as her own striking figure, gave an impression of distinction, although of distinction somewhat down in the world.
She was very young, and yet did not seem at all affected by her loneliness. Before long she noticed that Otto was observing her, and she bestowed a scornful glance upon him over the pages of her book.
He instantly flushed crimson, and turned away, feeling very uncomfortable. Then in the twilight silence of the spacious church, always deserted at this hour of the day, he heard a delicate insinuating voice call, "Feistmantel, dear!"
Involuntarily he looked round: it was the slender girl in the chair who had called.
He then observed hurrying towards her a short, stout individual in a striped gray-and-black water-proof with an opera-glass in a strap,--a wonderful creature, whom he had noticed before strolling about the church, but without an idea that she had anything to do with the attractive occupant of the chair.
"Feistmantel, dear."