"H'm! pas mal,--not particularly. Had I seen her anywhere else, I might perhaps have thought her pretty, but here--forgive my frankness, Countess Selina--no other woman has a chance when you are present. You must be conscious of that yourself."
"Vil flatteur!" the young wife exclaims, playfully lashing the Pole's hand with a skein of wool. The pair have known each other for scarcely three hours, and they are already upon as familiar a footing as if they had been friends from childhood. Moreover, they are connections. At Carlsbad, where Fainacky lately made the acquaintance of the Baroness Harfink and her daughter Paula, he informed the ladies that one of his grandmothers, a Löwenzahn by birth, was cousin to an uncle of the Baroness's.
The persistence with which he dwelt upon this fact, the importance he attached to being treated as a cousin by the Harfinks, touched Paula as well as her mother. Besides, as they had already told Selina, they liked him from the first.
"One is never ashamed to be seen with him," was the immediate decision of the fastidious ladies; and as time passed on they discovered in him such brilliant and unusual qualities that they considered him a great acquisition,--an entertaining, cultivated man of some talent.
He is neither cultivated nor entertaining, and as for his talent, that is a matter of opinion. If his singing is commonplace, his performance on the piano commonplace, and the vers de société which he scribbles in young ladies' extract-books more commonplace than all, in one art he certainly holds the first rank,--the art of discovering and humouring the weaknesses of his fellow-mortals, the art of the flatterer.
To pursue this art with distinguished ability two qualifications are especially needful,--impudence and lack of refinement. With the help of these allies the strongest incense may be wafted before one's fellow-creatures, and they will all--with the exception of a few suspicious originals--inhale it eagerly. Experience has taught Fainacky that boldness is of far more avail in this art than delicacy, and he conducts himself accordingly.
Flattery is his special profession, his means for supporting his idle, coxcomb existence,--flattery and its sister art, slander. A successful epigram at another's expense gives many of us more pleasure than a compliment paid to ourselves.
He flutters, flattering and gossiping, from one house to another. The last few weeks he has spent with a bachelor prince in the neighbourhood, who, a sufferer from neuralgia in the face, has been known, when irritated, to throw the sofa-cushions at his guests. At first Fainacky professed to consider this a very good joke; but one day when the prince showed signs of selecting more solid projectiles for the display of his merry humour, Fainacky discovered that the time had come for him to bestow the pleasure of his society elsewhere.
Dobrotschau seemed to offer just what he sought, and he has won his hostess's heart a second time by his abuse during luncheon of his late host's cook.
While he is now paying court to the Countess Selina, a touching scene is enacting in another part of the garden. Paula, who during her walk with her betrothed has perceived Treurenberg with his photographic apparatus in the distance, proposes to Harry that they be photographed as lovers. The poor young fellow's resistance avails nothing against Paula's strong will. She triumphantly drags him up before the apparatus, and, after much trying, discovers a pose which seems to her sufficiently tender. With her clasped hands upon Harry's shoulder, she gazes up at him with enthusiastic devotion.