Delila to tie his hands
behind him, and then at her bidding, he knelt down before her, and she
raised her whip and hit him hard.

"Oh! That hurts me most confoundedly," he exclaimed.

"I mean it to hurt you," she said with a mocking laugh, and went on
thrashing him without mercy. At last the poor fool groaned with pain,
but he consoled himself with the thought that each blow brought him
nearer to his happiness.

At the twenty-fourth cut, she threw the whip down.

"That only makes twenty-four," the beaten would-be, _Don Juan_,
remarked.

"I will make you a present of the twenty-fifth," she said with a laugh.

"And now you are mine, altogether mine," he exclaimed ardently.

"What are you thinking of?"

"Have I not let you beat me?"

"Certainly; but I promised you to grant your wish after the twenty-fifth
blow, and you have only received twenty-four," the cruel little bit of
virtue cried, "and I have witnesses to prove it."

With these words, she drew back the curtains over the door, and her
husband, followed by two other gentlemen came out of the next room,
smiling. For a moment the stockbroker remained speechless on his knees
before the beautiful woman; then he gave a deep sigh, and sadly uttered
that one, most significant word:

_"Crash!"_

AN HONEST IDEAL

Among my numerous friends in Vienna, there is one who is an author, and
who has always amused me by his childish idealism.

Not by his idealism from an abstract point of view, for in spite of my
Pessimism I am an absurd Idealist, and because I am perfectly well aware
of this, I as a rule never laugh at people's Idealism, but his sort of
Idealism was really too funny.

He was a serious man of great capabilities who only just fell short of
being learned, with a clear, critical intellect; a man without any
illusions about Society, the State, Literature, or anything else, and
especially not about women; but yet he was the craziest Optimist as soon
as he got upon the subject of actresses, theatrical princesses and
heroines; he was one of those men, who, like Hacklaender, cannot discover
the Ideal of Virtue anywhere, except in a ballet girl.

My friend was always in love with some actress or other; of course only
Platonically, and from preference with some girl of rising talent, whose
literary knight he constituted himself, until the time came when her
admirers laid something much more substantial than laurel wreaths at her
feet; then he withd