attitude of upright virtue is unbecoming, like
sitting too straight in a fauteuil. Don't ask me for opinions, however;
content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote. Madame
Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born. I remember her mother, an
old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the
Great's grenadiers. She was poor, however, and her principles were an
insufficient dowry for Anastasia, who was married very young to a vicious
Jew, twice her own age. He was supposed to have money, but I am afraid
he had less than was nominated in the bond, or else that his pretty young
wife spent it very fast. She has been a widow these six or eight years,
and has lived, I imagine, in rather a hand-to-mouth fashion. I suppose
she is some six or eight and thirty years of age. In winter one hears of
her in Berlin, giving little suppers to the artistic rabble there; in
summer one often sees her across the green table at Ems and Wiesbaden.
She's very clever, and her cleverness has spoiled her. A year after her
marriage she published a novel, with her views on matrimony, in the
George Sand manner--beating the drum to Madame Sand's trumpet. No doubt
she was very unhappy; Blumenthal was an old beast. Since then she has
published a lot of literature--novels and poems and pamphlets on every
conceivable theme, from the conversion of Lola Montez to the Hegelian
philosophy. Her talk is much better than her writing. Her
_conjugophobia_--I can't call it by any other name--made people think
lightly of her at a time when her rebellion against marriage was probably
only theoretic. She had a taste for spinning fine phrases, she drove her
shuttle, and when she came to the end of her yarn she found that society
had turned its back. She tossed her head, declared that at last she
could breathe the sacred air of freedom, and formally announced that she
had embraced an 'intellectual' life. This meant unlimited _camaraderie_
with scribblers and daubers, Hegelian philosophers and Hungarian
pianists. But she has been admired also by a great many really clever
men; there was a time, in fact, when she turned a head as well set on its
shoulders as this one!" And Niedermeyer tapped his forehead. "She has a
great charm, and, literally, I know no harm of her. Yet for all that, I
am not going to speak to her; I am not going near her box. I am going to
leave her to say, if she does me the honour to observe the omis