certain circles in the "nation of poets and
philosophers." His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers.
The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath
his uniform, his heritage from his own father, a renowned botanist,
director of the botanical gardens at Genoa, actively manifested itself in
a strong interest in science. Frederick's mother was a well-read woman,
passionately fond of the theatre and an enthusiastic lover of Goethe and
the poets of the romantic school. Her father, who had been prime minister
of Wittenberg, as a student and even later in his career, composed
poetry, which her adoring love for him had caused her to publish and
several times revise and reprint.

Though Frederick had never been ill, there were times when he showed
symptoms of a peculiar passionateness. His friends knew that when all
went well, he was a dormant volcano; that when things did not go so well,
he was a volcano spitting fire and smoke. To all appearances equally
removed from effeminateness and brutality, he was subject, nevertheless,
to accesses of both. Now and then a dithyrambic rapture came over him,
especially when there was wine in his blood. He would pace about, and if
it was daytime, might address a pathetic, sonorous invocation to the sun,
or at night, to the constellations, particularly to the chaste
Cassiopeia.

Since she had known him, Mara felt that his proximity was by no means
lacking in danger; but being what she was, it piqued her to play with
fire.

"I don't like people that think themselves better than others," she said.

"Being a Pharisee, I do," Frederick drily rejoined, and went on cruelly:
"I think for your years you are extremely forward and cock-sure. Your
dance pleases me better than your conversation." He felt much like a man
berating his sister.

Mara silently studied him for a moment, a suggestive smile on her lips.

"According to your notions," she finally said, "a girl mustn't speak
unless she's spoken to, and she mustn't have any opinions of her own. You
look as if the only sort of girl you could love would be one that was
always saying, 'I am a poor, ignorant thing. I don't understand what he
sees in me.' I hate such nincompoops!"

Conversation came to a halt. Frederick half rose to leave, but she
restrained him with a self-willed, pouting, "No." There was something
childlike and honest in that pouting "no" which touched his soul and drew
him down on t