ike other human beings. But a ballet
master's daughter from a little provincial town--I didn't hear of the
princely paternity until afterwards--I confess I was furious. I love
this family seat, and have enjoyed spending a few months of every year
here, away from the gayety of the capital. Now, I thought, I should be
compelled to see a _roturiere_ do the honors. But after the first
interview my feelings were entirely changed. Whoever her mother may
have been, she at least didn't belie the father's blood. And yet--at
that time she was but in the bud compared to the centifolia into which
she has since expanded. Pardon me if I threaten to become poetical.
Between ourselves--or even not between ourselves, since it's public
talk--my unfortunate passion for my beautiful cousin, which is as
hopeless as if I were in love with the Venus of Milo, has had so great
an influence upon the development of my character, that I can truly say
I'm no more like the man you met at little Baron L's., than an Ionic
column is like a hedge pole."

"Your poetic fervor, Herr Count, has at least the merit of a certain
impressiveness of style. But in what consists, if I may ask--"

"You're making sport of me, my honored sir. I still seem to you a
frivolous nobleman, a child of the world, with whom a grave man of your
stamp can at the utmost only chat away an hour at table. But learn to
know me better. This lady first opened my eyes to the fact that the
real charm of life consists in something forever unattainable, a
yearning that is ever unfulfilled. Are you familiar with Richard
Wagner's music? What I've just said of life he has striven to suggest
in art. For in what does the secret of melody consist? Take Mozart,
Glueck, the Italian composers--there everything is complete, every piece
has its beginning, its middle and its end, exactly like ordinary love
affairs. We are allured, we enjoy, and we grow weary--_voila tout_, and
if the music or the girl is beautiful, after a time we're again
allured--a new aria, a new ecstacy--and so on indefinitely till the
world tires us and our hair grows grey. This is the usual course of
life and art. But now think of a hopeless passion, such as I've felt
for years. I feel the same that I hear when I listen to Tristram and
Yseult--eternal longing, yearning and sighing, never repose and
satisfaction, a mere analysis of dissonances, and withal a tumult of
ecstacy in all the instruments, in which at last, as in a drea