d rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a
series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and
gentleness.

"What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a
fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in
love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not
indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband
is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an
opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber
is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her
kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so."

A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
a strange hand as follows:

"Your good son has just been summoned by Countess
Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear
father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you
know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be
without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.
I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable
to you as what your son would have written. I beg
my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your
obedient friend,

"CONSTANZE WEBER."

This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
improvisations.

The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
Wolfgang should move at once.

Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
gossip that he is to marry Constanze--ridiculous gossip, he calls it.

"I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
I have jested, I s