and were buried in state with their arms
and utensils for the other world. So that, while one might well be in
doubt whether an inscription was Lombard or not, an antiquary will tell
you without fail whether a clasp, a spearhead or a sword is or is not the
work of this conquering but too adaptable race. In these archaeological
matters Hauptmann took a forced and languid interest. During nightmarish
hours, when the beer and cheese had not mingled aright, he was haunted by
lines of Lombard runes. Sometimes they were East Germanic, and that was a
grief, taking, as it were, the bloom from the guess that had made him
great; and again they were West Germanic, and that was awful, the
hallucination ending in a mortal struggle with the feather bed under
which German science is incubated, and passing off with an anguished
"Donnerwetter! It cannot be Lombard. It is not possible." His not
infrequent Italian trips had, then, an archaeological pretext, and this
had been more or less the purpose of the pilgrimage in which Frauelein
Linda had become by main force an alluring if disquieting incident.

If there is anywhere in the world a more satisfactory sight than the
Pavian Certosa, certainly neither Hauptmann nor his chance acquaintance
had ever seen it. And indeed is there anywhere else such spaciousness of
cloisters, such profusion of minutely cut marble, such incrustation, for
better or worse, of semiprecious stones. Surely nothing in a sightseeing
way approaches it as a money's worth. Frauelein Linda, a superior person
who had begun to entertain doubts as to the externals of modern Austrian
palaces and the internals of new German liners, reserved her enthusiasms
for the pale Borgonones so strangely misplaced amid all that splendour.
Hauptmann, on the contrary, admired it all impartially. The sense of bulk
and inordinate expensiveness made him for a moment almost regret that
these later Lombards who reared this pile were not of the same race-stock
with himself. There was a moment in which he could have claimed them, had
principle permitted, as West Germans. Rather he soon forgot the Lombards
in the alternate rapture and dismay aroused by the petulant yet strangely
winning personality beside him. Professor Hauptmann was used neither to
being contradicted nor managed by mere women folk, and this afternoon he
was undergoing both experiences simultaneously. It was with a feeling of
relief that he left the Certosa, which seemed in a way