"The one, then, who distinguished himself at Solferino and got the Theresa cross?" Rohritz asks.
"The same," replies the captain.
"I do not know why I imagined that it must have been Heinrich Meineck. It was Franz, then." He adds, with some hesitation, "I did not know him personally, but I have heard a great deal of him. He must have been a charming officer and a delightful comrade, besides being one of the bravest men in the army----"
"He was particularly distinguished as a husband," Stasy exclaims, with her usual frank malice.
"We will not speak of that, Fräulein Stasy," says the captain. "My sister's marriage was certainly an insane, overwrought affair, and Franz gave his wife abundant cause for leaving him; but of the two lives his was the ruined one."
CHAPTER V.
[AN EXPERIMENT.]
Yes, of the two lives the colonel's was the ruined one; wherefore, in spite of all the evident and great fault on his side, the sympathies of every one were in his favour,--that is, of all his fellows who knew life and the world, and who were ready to give their regard and their sympathy to men as they are, instead of, like certain great philosophers, reserving their entire store of commiseration for those exquisitely correct creatures, men as they should be.
When they made each other's acquaintance in Lemberg at Lina's father's, General Leskjewitsch's, Franz Meineck was twenty-six and Lina Leskjewitsch thirty-two years old. Nevertheless the world--the world that was familiar with these two people--wondered far more at her fancy for him than at his falling a prey to her fascinations.
She had from her earliest years been an exceptionally interesting girl, and a position as such had always been accorded her without any effort on her part to obtain it, for in spite of all her whims and eccentricities no one could detect in her a spark of affectation or pretension. She was altogether too indifferent to what people said of her ever to pose for the applause of the crowd. Her egotism, fed as it was by the homage of those around her, led her to yield to the prompting of every caprice, and since she was very beautiful, and could be excessively fascinating when she chose,--since, moreover, her father held a distinguished office under government,--she was dubbed original and a genius where other girls would have been condemned as eccentric and unmaidenly.