'You are resentful still that the Countess Wanda took your rifle away? Surely she has made amends?'
'I was not thinking of that. She was perfectly right. She only treated me too well. She placed her house and her household at my disposition with a hospitality quite Spanish. I owe her too much ever to be able to express my sense of it.'
'Then you will come and tell her so?'
'I can do no less.'
Princess Ottilie and the mistress of Hohenszalras had had a discussion before that note of invitation was sent; a discussion which had ended as usual in the stronger reasoner giving way to the whim and will of the weaker.
'Why should we not be kind to him?' the Princess had urged; 'he is a gentleman. You know I took the precaution to write to Kaulnitz; Kaulnitz's answer is clear enough: and to Frohsdorf, from which it was equally satisfactory. I wrote also to the Comte de la Barée; his reply was everything which could be desired.'
'No doubt,' her niece had answered for the twentieth time; 'but I think we have already done enough for Christianity and hospitality; we need not offer him our personal friendship; as there is no master in this house he will not expect to be invited to it.' We will wish him God-speed when he is fully restored and is going away.'
'You are really too prudish!' said the Princess, very angrily. 'I should be the last person to counsel an imprudence, a failure in due caution, in correct reserve and hesitation; but for you to pretend that a Countess von Szalras cannot venture to invite a person to her own residence because that person is of the opposite sex——'
'That is not the question; the root of the matter is that he is a chance acquaintance made quite informally; we should have been cruel if we had done less than we have done, but there can be no need that we should do more.'
'I can ask more about him of Kaulnitz,' said Madame Ottilie.