I pass for her cousin in the Rosenstrasse."

"Capital! I'll answer for _our_ cousins. They'll be somewhat jealous,
which will make our attentions rise in value, in other respects we
shall be extremely agreeable. So in five minutes. The last room in the
rear on this corridor. And the dinner's _my_ affair."

He left Edwin at the door of his room and brushing his thin locks with
a small pocket brush and humming a tune, returned to his friends.

"Ladies," said he, as he entered the room where Mohr and the two girls
sat at a neatly laid table, "I must beg your pardon for a somewhat
arbitrary act. A friend of mine with a very charming and highly
respectable cousin are close beside us, under the same roof. I asked
him to join us, he's already acquainted with two of you, as he is no
less a personage than our friend Edwin, the philosopher."

"_Another_ admirer of our musician?" exclaimed Mohr. "I ought to
protest against it; I had subscribed for all the musical enthusiasm
that would be developed to-day, since Maquard adores in artists only
the charms of women. But be it so! This Edwin is an old friend of mine,
and moreover deeply in debt to Fraeulein Christiane for her daily free
concerts."

"Isn't he a tall man with light hair, not exactly handsome, but
interesting when he doesn't wear his old straw hat?" asked the little
singer in a gay, twittering voice, from whose speaking tones one would
never suppose that it could compass two octaves. At the first glance
she looked strikingly pretty, but on a closer inspection one perceived
that the features of the round face were not really harmonious, the
large eyes and turned up nose, the sentimental mouth and sensual chin
formed a strange contrast, and even her toilette was a bold composition
of all sorts of fantastic fragments. She wore a tolerably ancient black
velvet dress, which had once belonged to a much more stately prima
donna, a singular looking scarf of tulle and lace, a breast pin with a
photograph of a little terrier, ear-rings of coarse Roman mosaic, and
in her hair which was cut short and curled in little rings over her
head, a gold circlet. Her movements were sometimes very quick,
sometimes slow and languid. Only when she laughed, in doing which she
was apt to open her mouth a little too far, did the expression appear
to which her more intimate acquaintances alluded, when they called her
a "good follow," with whom "no one could get angry."

Beside this wild singul