"He showed it to you?" asked the count, coming to a stop, "well--and how did it look?"
The professor squinted, as if to look sharply at some object. "It looked," he said, "why, it really looked quite simple, you know. A narrow white slab like the gravestones in the Jewish cemeteries, a yard high, I guess, rounded at the top, and in the curve a face: the eyes simply two points, the nose a vertical stroke, the mouth a horizontal one--that was all. What do you say to that, ha?"
"Peculiar," said the count, looking out into the garden over the professor's head.
"Yes, but the most wonderful part of it was," continued the professor, lowering his voice as if speaking of very mysterious things, "that I at once said 'Ah yes,' for it was immediately obvious to me, and I knew that that was beauty-in-itself; yes, I felt as if I had really known it for a long time. How do you explain that?"
"Why, that is not easy," replied the count a little absentmindedly, still looking out into the garden.
Yonder between the hollyhocks and the beds of mallow there were now signs of life. A bevy of young girls and men came down the path toward the house, light summer dresses and flannel suits and an eager whirl of voices. Now the professor also became silent and turned toward the newcomers. There were his two daughters, big girls in flaming pink batiste dresses and yellow sun-hats, both very heated. Both were laughing at once in a high, rather shrill soprano. Beside them walked Lieutenant von Rabitow of the Alexander Regiment, a little stiff-legged in his white tennis suit. The count's two nephews, Egon and Moritz of Hohenlicht, both students, both very fair, their hair parted all the way down to their necks, had stopped midway and were sparring with their racquets. Miss Demme, the governess, was chiding and pushing fourteen-year-old Erika before her, and Erika opposed her by moving but sluggishly her thin legs in their black stockings. The two old gentlemen complacently let this wave of youthful life swirl by them. Both smiled a little.
"Do you see, Professor, yonder is instantly obvious beauty, too, really beauty-in-itself," resumed the count, pointing to a bed full of fat dark-red "Sultan of Zanzibar" roses, beside which his seventeen-year-old daughter Billy was standing.
It was very pretty to see the girl standing there by the roses in her light-blue summer dress, her round face pink and smiling and hatless. In the blinding sunshine her hair had a deep, warm brown like old port, and the whole picture was as richly colored as a flower-bed. Beside Billy stood Marion Bonnechose, the daughter of the French governess, who had been brought up with Billy; short and dark, with brown eyes too large for her lean, somewhat yellowish face, which were looking at Billy with watchful interest.
"Certainly," said the professor, "Countess Sibyl is indubitably very beautiful, but the beauty-in-itself in my dream was simply a semicircular white tablet."