ndia shawl. A string of massive amethysts completed a
discord as elaborate as a harmony of Richard Strauss. Her whole
impression was almost as inviting as it was grotesque. One could not chat
with her without liking her, and it is to be suspected that only a very
guileless or austere male could like her without proceeding to manifest
attentions.

By the cheese, she had captured her amazed professor, and then she
carried him off bodily for coffee in the Arcade. He talked little, but it
didn't matter, for she talked much and well. Nor could a provincial Saxon
scholar be quite indifferent at finding himself known to an intelligent
and much travelled Viennese. A cousin, it appeared, had followed his
lectures and had highly extolled the ingenuity of his phonology of the
Lombard tongue, a language which was, she must remember--a hesitating
pause--yes, surely East--"East Germanic, Ja wohl!" responded the
Professor thunderously, though idiots had written to the contrary. And
then he told her at length the reasons why, until she pleaded her early
morning sketching and firmly bound him to accompany her the next
afternoon to the Certosa of Pavia. The Herr Professor rarely paid much
attention to hands, but as he held Frauelein Goeritz's for Good Night he
could not but note that it was soft and filled his big grip so well that
he was sorry when it was gone. He dismissed the observation, however, as
unworthy a philologer and went to sleep pondering a new destruction for
the knaves who held the Lombard tongue to be not East but West Germanic.

And here, to appreciate the weight and importance of Linda's fish, a
little explanation is necessary. Hauptmann was not merely a philologer,
which is a formidable thing in itself, but he belonged to the esoteric
group that deals with languages which have no literature. As he had often
remarked, any fool could compile a grammar of a language that has left
extensive documents; the process was almost mechanical, but to
reconstruct a grammar of a language that has left practically no remains,
that required acumen. Hauptmann did not belong, however, to the
transcendental school that creates purely inferential languages--East
Germanic and West, General Teutonic, Original Slavic, Indo-European and
the like. These are the _Dii majores_ and their inventions are as
complete as if one should detect, say, the relation of the little to the
big fleas not by the cunning use of the microscope but by sheer
infe