violoncello. Then followed girls who painted, poetized, botanized, and
hammered metal. Once--an exception--he had succumbed to the charms of an
actress who essayed characters in the dumps--Ibsen soubrettes,
Strindberg servants, and Maxim Gorky tramps. Yet he had, somehow or
other, emerged heart whole from his adventures among those masterpieces
of the cosmos--women.

Certainly this might be another romance added to the long list of his
sentimental fractures. He ate his dinner, the one satisfactory meal of
the day allowed him by a cruel doctor, with the utmost deliberation. He
had walked three hours during the morning, and now, under the spacious
balconies of the Forstwarte, he knew that his beef and spinach would be
none the worse for a small bottle of very dry, light Voeslauer. Besides,
his physician had not actually forbidden him a little liquid at the
midday meal. Just before bedtime he was entitled--so his dietetic
schedule told him--to one glass of Pilsner beer. Not so bad, after all,
this banting at Marienbad, he reflected. Anyhow, it was better than the
existence of those fellows at sea-shore and mountain, who gorged and
guzzled their summer away. Then he tried to remember among his London
club friends any who were as heavy as he, but he could not. Idly
smoking, he regarded the piazzas, with their tables and groups of obese
humanity, eating, drinking, and buzzing--little fat flies, he thought,
as he drew his waistcoat in, feeling quite haughty and slender.

He read on a placard that the "Praeger Bavarian Sextet" would give a
"grand" concert at the Hotel Bellevue this very afternoon. "Ah ha!" said
Krayne aloud, "that's the girl I saw!" Then he wasted several hours more
loitering about the beautiful park on the Kaiserstrasse and looking in
the shop windows at views of Marienbad on postal cards, at
yellow-covered French, German, and Russian novels, at pictures of kings,
queens, and actresses. He also visited the houses wherein Goethe,
Chopin, and Wagner had dwelt. It was four o'clock when he entered the
garden of the Bellevue establishment and secured a table. The waiter at
his request removed the other chairs, so he had a nook to himself. Not a
very large crowd was scattered around; visitors at Marienbad do not care
to pay for their diversions. In a few minutes, after a march had been
banged from a wretched piano--were pianos ever tuned on the Continent,
he wondered?--the sextet appeared, looking as it did in the m