successes in
foreign taverns. He had always left drawing-room gossip to spread his
reputation with its thousand tongues and, by the mere mention of his
name, fill maids and matrons with an exciting mixture of timid fear and
eager yearning, indignant pride and tender pity. Now a torturing anxiety
beset him lest his great deeds might be forgotten, and he humbled himself
to the character of bard of his own epic poem. He told his last
conquests who, naturally, with self-torturing curiosity inquired about
it, chapter after chapter of the romance of his heart, half-opened his
famous drawers and permitted them to catch a glimpse of letters,
likenesses, and locks of hair; he strove to soothe his self-esteem by
showing what passions he had inspired, at the risk of having his fair
listener, with a secret smile, imagine exaggeration where, in reality, he
was merely boasting.

Such was his mental condition at this time. He had toilsomely erected a
sort of sham paradise of stage scenery, in which he continued to play the
character of the youthful lover, which he was scarcely entitled to
continue in life, and now this luckless doctor, with a careless movement,
had thrown down all the painted canvasses with their artificial scenes.

Thiel's brutal remark: "You must renounce love," was still echoing
painfully in his soul when he entered the home of Frau von der Lehde,
with whom according to old habit, he dined once a week.

Else von der Lehde was a year or two older than he. She had been maid of
honor to the princess, when Robert was a page. She had loved him deeply,
fervently, and received a little responsive affection in return. But
that was already so far back in the past. It was a distant memory,
suffused with the rosy light of dawn, associated with all the new, fresh
feelings of her life, youth, the awakening of her heart, first love,
jealousy, and torment. The little idyl, in its day, was noticed by every
one, but people were disposed to regard it as harmless, and Else herself
afterward strove to see it in the same light, though she was well aware
of its real condition. Still, a beardless boy of eighteen could not
seriously compromise a young lady of twenty, who had been in society
three winters. He was so far from doing so, that the whispers and smiles
of this society did not prevent her becoming the wife of President von
der Lehde who, after fifteen years of wedded life, left her a childless
widow in the most pleas