The next day I took my last bath.
On our return journey, at Cologne, an odd thing happened.
It was early, and I was sleepy. I was waiting for breakfast in melancholy mood, and was contemplating a huge pile of elegant hand-luggage which a servant in a very correct dark suit was superintending, when two ladies, followed by a maid, made their appearance, one fair, the other dark, from the dressing-room, which had been locked in our faces. In honour of these two princesses we had been obliged to remain unwashed. Ah, how fresh and neat and pretty they both looked! The dark one was by far the handsomer of the two, but she looked gloomy and discontented, spoke never a word, and after a hurried breakfast became absorbed in a newspaper. The fair one, on the contrary, a striking creature, with a very large hat and a profusion of passementerie on her travelling-cloak, talked a great deal and very loudly to a short, fat woman who was going with her little son to Frankfort, and who addressed the blonde as "Frau Countess."
The name of the short woman was Frau Kampe, and the name of the Countess, which I shortly learned, shall be told in due time. The Countess complained of the fatigue of travelling; Frau Kampe, in a sympathetic tone, declared that it was almost impossible to sleep in the railway-carriages at this time of year, they were so overcrowded. But the Countess rejoined with a laugh,--
"We had as much room as we wanted all the way; my husband secures that by his fees. He is much too lavish, as I often tell him. Since I have been travelling with him we have always had two railway-carriages, one for me and my maid, and the other for him and his cigars. It has been delightful."
"Even upon your wedding tour?" asked her handsome, dark companion, looking up from her reading.
"Ha, ha, ha! Yes, even upon our wedding tour," said the other. "We were a very prosaic couple, entirely independent of each other,--quite an aristocratic match!" And she laughed again with much self-satisfaction.
"Where is the Herr Count?" asked Frau Kampe. "I should like to make his acquaintance."
"Oh, he is not often to be seen; he is smoking on the platform somewhere. I scarcely ever meet him; he never appears before the third bell has rung. A very aristocratic marriage, you see, Frau Kampe,--such a one as you read of."
The Countess's beautiful companion frowned, and the little Kampe boy grinned from ear to ear,--I could not tell whether it was at the aristocratic marriage or at the successful solution of an arithmetical problem which he had just worked out on the paper cover of one of Walter Scott's novels.