"My dear Falk, do not tear past me so unheedingly, I beg you! Do you, then, not recognize me?"
Thus a stout old lady cries in a deep rough voice to a gentleman whose arm she has energetically grasped with both hands.
The gentleman--his carriage betokens a retired officer; his wrinkles betray him to be a contemporary of the lady--starts back.
"Oh! it is you, Baroness!" cries he, and half recalls that forty years or so ago he was an admirer of hers, and remembers very distinctly that last winter he had quarrelled with her at whist on account of a revoke.
"I am indescribably pleased," he adds, with well-bred resignation, and at the same time glances after a passing blonde chignon whose coquettish curls float to and fro as if they said "catch me!"
"Ah, ah! age does not protect you from folly!" laughs the old woman. "She interests you, the person with the yellow hair, eh? Dyed, my dear man, dyed, I assure you. It is not worth the trouble to run after her. Her back is pretty, mais pour le reste! Hm! Sit down and talk to me for a little!"
The yellow chignon has vanished round a corner and the energetic old woman has drawn her ex-adorer down on a bench in the meagre shade of a watering-place promenade, upon a grass-green bench under gray-brown trees.
It is in Franzensbad in July; afternoon; around them the sleepy stillness of a place where there is nothing to do and one cannot amuse one's self.
Some ladies, pale, sickly, dressed with the grotesque elegance which is permissible in a watering-place, pass, some with arms bare to the elbow, others with pearls round their necks, still others with floating hair.
"How glad I am, my dear Colonel!" cries the old Baroness to her captive, for at least the tenth time. "But how are you, pray tell me? No! Where do you get your elixir of life? You remain so fabulously young!"