"Colonel!" now cries a gay voice.
"Ah, Countess!" Intently gazing after Linda's seductive apparition, the Colonel had not noticed the approach of the so-long-awaited Countess Dey. Now he springs up, "falls at her feet, kisses her hands," naturally only with words, and searches all his pockets for the letter for her.
The Countess meanwhile, with lorgnon at her eyes, indifferently gazes at her surroundings.
"I just met a little person who is considered a great beauty--Hopfing or Harpfink is her name, I believe. They say that Lanzberg is engaged to her--that cannot be true?"
"I have heard so too," says the Colonel. "Curious match--what do you say to it, Countess?"
"Felix Lanzberg is as unfortunate as ever," murmurs the Countess.
But Klette shrugs her fat shoulders and hisses: "What does it matter if a certain Lanzberg makes a mésalliance?"
II.
A tall form, slender, perhaps too narrow-shouldered, with too long arms, a small head with bushy, light brown hair fastened in a thick knot low on her neck, a golden furze at neck and temples, a pale, almost sallow, little face with large blue eyes, which love to look up and away from the earth like those of a devout cherub, a short, small nose, a little mouth which, with the corners slightly curving up, seems destined by nature for continual laughter, but later evidently disturbed by fate in this gay calling, in every movement the dreamy grace of a woman who, when scarcely grown, had experienced a great misfortune or a severe illness, all this pervaded by a breath of fanciful earnestness, melancholy tenderness, and united into an harmonious whole--Elsa--the sister of the "certain Felix Lanzberg," and since five years the wife of the Freiherr von Garzin.
She is like a flower, but not like one of those proud, luxuriant roses which pass their life amid sunbeams and butterflies, but rather one of those delicate, white blossoms which have grown in deep shadow during a cold spring, and which close their petals from the sun.