"What I think? I have not yet found out the riddle. So much, however, I know, that she is not a flesh and blood girl, but a water-nixie, a Melusina, 'cold even to her heart,' and who knows whether her very figure does not end like a mermaid's 'desinit in piscem?'"
He sprang up. "I must beg you not to speak in such a tone!"
"Patience, old boy," said I. "Do not go and suppose that I think lightly of her. A past history she has that is quite clear. But why need there be any harm in it? Suppose there were only some misfortune, a great grief, or a great love?"
"You think so?" and he looked at me anxiously and sadly.
"I should not be at all surprised," I continued, "if she, with those precocious eyes and that wonderful composure, had already traversed the agonies of hopeless love. Do not forget her Polish father. Polish girls begin early both to excite and to feel passion. How the poor child ever got into that fly-trap, God knows. But you and I together should find it difficult to deliver her out of it."
After that followed a silent quarter of an hour, during which he turned over my MS. poems.
"I should like to copy out this song," he suddenly said, reaching out a page to me.
"What for?" asked I. "Bastel, I half suspect you want to pass it off as your own."
"Shame upon you!" returned he with a deep flush, "I give myself out for a poet! But I have a tune running in my head; it is long since I have composed anything."
"Look out something better and more cheerful. What could you make of that feeble-minded whimper? That song is half a year old" (dated from that 'olden time' that I could not myself distinctly remember!)