ola was in reality
very small, pale, and thin, or _frele_, with beautiful blue eyes and
curly black hair. She was a typical beauty, with a face full of
character, and a person of remarkably great and varied reading. One of
her most intimate friends was wont to tell her that she and I had many
very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else,
while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like both of
us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul against an
atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most varied kind,
till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of Apuleius, and proceed to
establish her views according to his subtle Neo-Platonism. But she
romanced and embroidered so much in conversation that she did not get
credit for what she really knew.

I once met with a literary man in New York who told me he had long
desired to make my acquaintance, because he had heard her praise me so
immeasurably beyond anybody else she had ever known, that he wanted to
see what manner of man I could be. I heard the same from another, in
another place long after. Once she proposed to me to make a bolt with
her to Europe, which I declined. The secret of my influence was that I
always treated her with respect, and never made love or flirted.

An intimate of both of us who was present when this friendly proposal was
made remarked with some astonishment, "But, Madame, by what means can you
two _live_?" "Oh," replied Lola innocently and confidingly, "people like
us" (or "who know as much as we") "can get a living anywhere." And she
rolled us each a cigarette, with one for herself. I could tell a number
of amusing tales of this Queen of Bohemia, but Space, the Kantean god,
forbids me more. But I may say that I never had more really congenial
and wide-embracing conversations with any human being in my life than
with Her Majesty. There was certainly no topic, within my range, at
least, on which she could not converse with some substance of personal
experience and reading. She had a mania for meeting and knowing all
kinds of peculiar people.

I lived in the main street near the Karlsthor, opposite a tavern called
the Ober-Pollinger, which was a mediaeval tavern in those days. My
landlady was a nice old soul, and she had two daughters, one of whom was
a beauty, and as gentle and Germanly good as a girl could be. Her face
still lives in a great picture by a great artist. W