picture and thinking of what
Courvoisier had said: "Beauty, impudence, assurance, and an admiring
public." That the girl was beautiful--at least, she had the battered
remains of a decided beauty; she had impudence certainly, and assurance
too, and an admiring public, I supposed, which testified its admiration
by lolling on a couch and staring at her, or keeping its hat on and
turning its back to her.

"Do you really admire the picture, Herr von Francius?" I inquired.

"Indeed I do. It is so admirably true. That is the kind of life into
which I was born, and in which I was for a long time brought up; but I
escaped from it."

I looked at him in astonishment. It seemed so extraordinary that
that model of reticence should speak to me, above all, about himself.
It struck me for the very first time that no one ever spoke of von
Francius as if he had any one belonging to him. Calm, cold, lonely,
self-sufficing--and self-sufficing, too, because he must be so, because
he had none other to whom to turn--that was his character, and viewing
him in that manner I had always judged him. But what might the truth be?

"Were you not happy when you were young?" I asked, on a quick impulse.

"Happy! Who expects to be happy? If I had been simply not miserable, I
should have counted my childhood a good one; but--"

He paused a moment, then went on:

"Your great novelist, Dickens, had a poor, sordid kind of childhood
in outward circumstances. But mine was spiritually sordid--hideous,
repulsive. There are some plants which spring from and flourish in mud
and slime; they are but a flabby, pestiferous growth, as you may
suppose. I was, to begin with, a human specimen of that kind; I was in
an atmosphere of moral mud, an intellectual hot-bed. I don't know what
there was in me that set me against the life; that I never can tell. It
was a sort of hell on earth that I was living in. One day something
happened--I was twelve years old then--something happened, and it seemed
as if all my nature--its good and its evil, its energies and indolence,
its pride and humility--all ran together, welded by the furnace of
passion into one furious, white-hot rage of anger, rebellion. In an
instant I had decided my course; in an hour I had acted upon it. I am an
odd kind of fellow, I believe. I quitted that scene and have never
visited it since. I can not describe to you the anger I then felt, and
to which I yielded. Twelve years old I was then. I fought har