"Oh, that you shall certainly do!" exclaimed Veronica, in delight. "Come as often as you please. You will be a welcome guest."
"I thank you," replied Heinrich.
Meantime, Cornelia had been conversing with the extremely polite old gentleman, and Heinrich now asked who this eccentric person was.
With gay humor she described his peculiarities, and in a low tone related how, on festival occasions and during public speeches, he often disturbed the bystanders by repeating the words half under his breath, and supplying the bows omitted by the orator; how he always most dutifully repeated the last words said to him; how he invariably removed his hat when he saw two persons salute each other in the street, etc. etc.
"Do you know," she said, at last, "I think this proceeds from an excess of benevolence and sympathy! It must be the same feeling that prompts the mother who hears her daughter say a pretty thing to put on precisely the same expression. The mother enters into her child's situation so earnestly that she involuntarily imitates all her looks and gestures; nay, I once saw an actress, starring with her daughter, so carried away by the latter's playing that she unconsciously imitated her darling, and almost merged her own part in her child's. What is this except an excess of sympathy for the beloved being?"
She then, in a most masterly manner, imitated the different mothers and the tragic scene of the two ladies upon the stage, so that those around burst into shouts of laughter.
Yet the gayer the others became the more serious Heinrich looked: and she asked, with mingled surprise and anxiety, why they all had so little success in amusing him.
"Oh, you do not know how happy I am!" he replied; "but I am reflecting about something. I see you develop so many different traits and talents that I am bewildered. When I have at last succeeded in harmonizing one of your changeful moods with your whole character, before I am aware of it a new picture appears before me, which I must again incorporate with the whole. You keep me in a perpetual mental excitement, and it seems as if I were compelled to sketch the different waves upon the sea-shore. Scarcely have I fixed my eyes upon one ere it is already swallowed up in another, and I am constantly raising my eyes again to sketch the whole as it spreads before me in its infinite majesty."
He gazed at her with so strange an expression that she looked down as if dazzled.
"Oh, what are you making me?" she said, in confusion. "I am a very simple person, who am merry with the mirthful and serious with the grave. If I am different from others in any way it is because I am always natural. Thousands feel as keenly, change their moods as frequently, as I; but it is not noticed in them, because they have accustomed themselves to a uniform etiquette, an unvarying manner. I have often envied such persons, for they know how to give themselves the stamp of a finished individuality far better than natures like mine, which are sometimes thought gay, sometimes melancholy, now good and then bad, or not at all what they seem, which are sometimes too little, sometimes too much, trusted, and rarely or never understood."