The six or eight gentlemen in attendance, with the exception of
Achleitner, laughed and withdrew with a humorous show of great obedience.

"Why do you stay here, Achleitner?" Thus the faithful canine received his
dismissal.

Frederick saw how the men withdrew together in groups at a little
distance, whispering as they usually do when having sport with a pretty
woman who is not exactly a prude; and it was with some shame, at any
rate, with expressed repugnance that he took the stool still warm from
Achleitner's body. Mara began to rhapsodise about nature.

"Isn't everything prettiest when the sun goes down? I think it's fun--at
least I like it," she quickly substituted, when Frederick made a wry face
at the remark. She spoke in sentences that all began with "I don't like,"
or "I despise," or "I do detest." In the face of that vast cosmic drama
unfolding itself before her senses, she sat wholly unmoved and
unsympathetic, displaying the overweening arrogance of a spoiled child.
Frederick wanted to jump up, but remained where he was, pulling nervously
at the end of his moustache, while his face assumed a stiff, mocking
expression. Mara noticed it, and was visibly upset by this unusual form
of homage.

Frederick had one of those idealistic heads set on broad shoulders
characteristic of certain circles in the "nation of poets and
philosophers." His ancestors had been scholars, statesmen, and soldiers.
The general, his father, was in externals wholly the soldier; but beneath
his uniform, his heritage from his own father, a renowned botanist,
director of the botanical gardens at Genoa, actively manifested itself in