eye, so keenly alive as it always is to beauty, and your acute
perception as well? But Heaven be thanked for it, otherwise I should
have had you for a rival, and then the blood of one of us would have
had to be spilled." Siegmund, perceiving how matters stood with his
friend, skilfully interposed and said, after remarking that all
argument with one in love about the object of his affections was out of
place, "Yet it's very strange that several of us have formed pretty
much the same opinion about Olimpia. We think she is--you won't take it
ill, brother?--that she is singularly statuesque and soulless. Her
figure is regular, and so are her features, that can't be gainsaid; and
if her eyes were not so utterly devoid of life, I may say, of the power
of vision, she might pass for a beauty. She is strangely measured in
her movements, they all seem as if they were dependent upon some
wound-up clock-work. Her playing and singing has the disagreeably
perfect, but insensitive time of a singing machine, and her dancing is
the same. We felt quite afraid of this Olimpia, and did not like to
have anything to do with her; she seemed to us to be only acting _like_
a living creature, and as if there was some secret at the bottom of it
all." Nathanael did not give way to the bitter feelings which
threatened to master him at these words of Siegmund's; he fought down
and got the better of his displeasure, and merely said, very earnestly,
"You cold prosaic fellows may very well be afraid of her. It is only to
its like that the poetically organised spirit unfolds itself. Upon me
alone did her loving glances fall, and through my mind and thoughts
alone did they radiate; and only in her love can I find my own self
again. Perhaps, however, she doesn't do quite right not to jabber a lot
of nonsense and stupid talk like other shallow people. It is true, she
speaks but few words; but the few words she docs speak are genuine
hieroglyphs of the inner world of Love and of the higher cognition of
the intellectual life revealed in the intuition of the Eternal beyond
the grave. But you have no understanding for all these things, and I am
only wasting words." "God be with you, brother," said Siegmund very
gently, almost sadly, "but it seems to me that you are in a very bad
way. You may rely upon me, if all--No, I can't say any more." It all at
once dawned upon Nathanael that his cold prosaic friend Siegmund really
and sincerely wished him well, and so he w