A strange anomaly, with his learning and industry, in the midst of the heterogeneous feminine idleness of the Pension. In a vague way all the women felt it. His appearance, too, was strikingly suggestive of a personality inaccessible to the trivialities round which their own souls centred. Once a strong, thick-set man, he retained at seventy-two, great breadth of bent shoulders. His hair, scanty at the top and long, was still black, as were his heavy eyebrows, beneath which gleamed lustrous black eyes. The sombre depth of the latter and the deep furrowings on his dark, square face gave it, in moments of repose, a stern expression but when a smile or the play of fancy or interest lit it up, it was like the sunshine breaking upon a granite scaur. The very magic of the change had in it something eerie, incomprehensible. And a rare tenderness could sometimes well from the heart into the eyes, making the old face beautiful; but that was not displayed for the benefit of the ladies of the Pension. The fresh instincts of the young girl, however, divined the underlying tenderness and brought it to the surface. It was a natural intimacy, which cheered both lives. The old scholar's genial humour, delicate, playful fancy, evoked in Felicia spontaneity of merry thought and speech. The meals, which once had been such ordeals, when eaten under the whirlwind of Mme. Boccard's half-intelligible platitudes, became invested with a rare charm. Instead of sitting shy and silent, she laughed and jested with the inconsequence of twenty. The change was so marked, that one day, when a mock quarrel arose between the old man and herself, over the exact halving of a pear, Mme. Popea elevated surprised eyebrows, and nudged Frau Schultz her neighbour. “_Voilà bien les femmes!_ a man--a mummy will suffice--but let it be masculine!” “And the men, they are all the same,” said Frau Schultz, in her thick South German. “Give them a pretty face, and no matter how old, they are on fire.” Frau Schultz applied herself again seriously to her meal, whilst Madame Popea repeated her own observation to Madame Boccard, who laughed, and prophesied a wedding in the pension. But as all this was whispered, it did not reach the ears of the parties concerned, at the other end of the table.