these people wish to be elevated above ordinary prejudices!"
exclaimed the doctor fiercely, putting on his hat. "If you really were
so elevated, you would not be too proud to accept a few pitiful drops
of wine from an old college friend! Go, you are perfect fools with your
idealism!"

"And you are on the way to become as famous a doctor as old Heim. At
least you already have the needful roughness!" laughed Edwin.

The doctor heard him no longer; he had slammed the door and was noisily
descending the stairs. Balder looked at his brother.

"You ought not to have refused," said he. "He means kindly, and he is
undoubtedly right: our diet is not fit for you."

"So you, too, are beginning to scold," said Edwin, drinking the
remainder of his milk as if it were the most exquisite nectar. "But the
trump of doom would not disturb the serenity of my soul to-day. I am in
exactly the phlegmatic, abstract frame of mind, to which the most
difficult problems seem like child's play. It is a pity I have nothing
harder to elucidate than how it comes to pass that a crazy man can say
such clever things in his dreams, and yet on awaking be just as mad as
before."

"What do you mean?"

"I have been most dutifully dreaming of the acquaintance I made
yesterday; you remember, child, _la belle Chocoladiere_. I discovered,
God knows how, that she was the daughter of a Polish countess and a
French _valet de chambre_; a thoroughly ignorant, vain, and not
over-virtuous creature. As she made merry over my defective French, I
quietly began to explain how grateful she ought to be that a sensible
man conversed with her at all. Then I talked long and very impressively
about the dignity of man in general and philosophers in particular;
something after the style of Wieland's sages, and she, after at first
looking as if she were grieving over her weaknesses and sins, suddenly
began to laugh loudly, danced around the room--in the style of the
rope-dancers we saw yesterday--hummed French songs of by no means the
most decorous nature, and altogether conducted herself in such a manner
that I grew more and more angry, and at last told her to her face that
I should consider myself the most contemptible fool and weakling on
earth, if I allowed her little nose and black eyelashes to turn my head
an instant longer. She now became very haughty, I still colder and more
bitter, she more bacchanalian, and I was just in the act of jumping out
of a low window into a