ay that
his correspondence with Albertine languishes, and that the letters are
becoming rarer and colder. Who knows whether or not anything will ever
come, ultimately, of the engagement between those two people? Certainly
Albertine won't be long "in the market" in any case; she is so pretty,
and so well off. Just at present, there is young Mr. Gloria (just going
to be called to the bar), a very nice young gentleman indeed, with a
slim and tightly-girded waist, a couple of waistcoats on at once, and a
cravat tied in the English style; and he danced all last season with
Albertine, and is to be seen now going continually with her to the
Thiergarten, whilst the Commissionsrath trots very complacently after
them, looking like a satisfied father. Moreover, Mr. Gloria has passed
his second examination at the Supreme Court with flying colours.

"So perhaps he and Albertine may make a match of it, should he get a
fairly good appointment. There's no telling. Let us see what happens."

"You have certainly written a wonderfully crack-brained thing in that,"
Ottmar said, when Lothair had finished. "This 'Tale containing
improbable incidents,' as you have called it, appears to me to be a
kind of mosaic, composed of all kinds of stones put together at random,
which dazzles and confuses one's eyes so that they can't take firm hold
of any definite figure."

"As far as I am concerned," Theodore said, "I must confess that I think
a great deal of it is exceedingly delightful, and that it might very
likely have been a very superior production, if Lothair hadn't, most
imprudently, gone and read Hafftitz. The consequence of this was that
those two practitioners of the black art, the Goldsmith and the
Jew-coiner, had to be brought into the story somehow, willy-nilly; and
thus those two unfortunate revenants make their appearance as
heterogeneous elements, working, with their sorceries, in an
unnaturally constrained manner among the incidents of the tale. It is
well your story hasn't been printed, or you would have been hauled over
the coals by the critics."

"Wouldn't it do to light up the pages of a Berlin Almanack?" the Author
asked, with one of his ironical smiles. "Of course I should still more
localize the localities, and add a few names of celebrities, and so
gain a little applause from the literary-aesthetic, if from nobody
else.[2]

[Footnote 2: "This speech of Lothair's shows what the Author had in his
mind at the time. The