"My voice will not wake her," he says, softly, taking Elsa's hand. "Elsa, my dear pouting Elsa, forgive me," he whispers. "I had no right to be angry and run away, merely because you were intolerable. It has been a horrid day, let it at least have a good ending!"
He sees how she trembles, how she blushes, and tenderly he takes her thin little face between both hands. Then, then she changes color, her eyes open in wild horror, and she starts back from him with a gesture of decided aversion, but quickly collecting herself, and forcing herself to smile, she gives him her hand and says, "Good night!"
How she has pained him! Is her love dead? He cannot understand her manner. How could he? He does not notice that on his hands, in his clothes has remained the peculiar perfume which a gallant diplomat had brought Linda from Constantinople.
XVIII.
"One cannot please people," sighs Pistasch, several days after the lawn-tennis party, while, cigar between his teeth, a hat adorned with a cock's plume on the back of his head, his smoking jacket open over his broad chest, he tries to solve a difficult problem in billiards. "One cannot please people."
"Hm! I think this sentence belonged to Solomon's répertoire of phrases," grumbles Sempaly, who, stretched out in a deep arm-chair, is looking over an old Revue des Deux Mondes.
"Solomon! Solomon!" says Pistasch, clutching his soft golden hair. "Was not that the Jew in the Leopoldstadt, whose money rate was so cheap, only three per cent, per mese?"
Count Kamenz considers it "chic" to have forgotten his Bible history.
"Do not make yourself out stupider than you are," Scirocco admonishes him. "We can be quite satisfied without that."
"Thanks, you see one can never please people," repeats Pistasch, shrugging his shoulders in droll despair. "After the sacrificial meal, Mimi rejoices me with a remark upon my stiffness to the Lanzberg. I show the latter much-calumniated beauty some slight attention and accept an invitation to lawn-tennis at her house. Mimi reproaches me concerning my morals. In order to satisfy her demands I yesterday paid court to a sixteen-year-old dove; she reproaches me for my inconsequence, says with feeling, 'One does not trifle with love!'--there, it sounds as if it were a bit from a play." Pistasch turns to Sempaly.