“Then up to the time when people call us ‘Backfisch,’ for some unknown reason, I had really acquired a remarkable attachment for you and thought that I could never find a more pleasing friend in the world. Mother, sister, or brother I had not, you know; to my father a slow-worm in alcohol was far more interesting than I, and people (I count girls such) must surely have something with which they can occupy their thoughts and the like. Then you were that something, but when archæology overcame you, I made the discovery that you—excuse the familiarity, but your new formality sounds absurd to me—I was saying that I imagined that you had become an intolerable person, who had no longer, at least for me, an eye in his head, a tongue in his mouth, nor any of the memories that I retained of our childhood friendship. So I probably looked different from what I did formerly, for when, occasionally, I met you at a party, even last winter, you did not look at me and I did not hear your voice; in this, of course, there was nothing which marked me out especially, for you treated all the others in the same way. To you I was but air, and you, with your shock of light hair, which I had formerly pulled so often, were as boresome, dry and tongue-tied as a stuffed cockatoo and at the same time as grandiose as an—archæopteryx; I believe the excavated, antediluvian bird-monster is so called; but that your head harboured an imagination so magnificent as here in Pompeii to consider me something excavated and restored to life—I had not surmised that of you, and when you suddenly stood before me unexpectedly, it cost me some effort at first to understand what kind of incredible fancy your imagination had invented. Then I was amused, and, in spite of its madness, it was not entirely displeasing to me. For, as I said, I had not expected it of you.” With that, her expression and tone somewhat mollified at the end, Miss Zoë Bertgang finished her unreserved, detailed and instructive lecture, and it was indeed notable how exactly she then resembled the figure of Gradiva on the bas-relief, not only in her features, her form, her eyes, expressive of wisdom, and her charmingly wavy hair, but also in her graceful manner of walking which he had often seen; her drapery, too, dress and scarf of a cream-coloured, fine cashmere material which fell in soft, voluminous folds, completed the extraordinary resemblance of her whole appearance. There might have been much foolishness in the belief that a young Pompeiian girl, destroyed two thousand years ago by Vesuvius, could sometimes walk around alive again, speak, draw and eat bread, but even if the belief brought happiness, it assumed everywhere, in the bargain, a considerable amount of incomprehensibility; and in consideration of all the circumstances, there was incontestably present, in the judgment of Norbert Hanold, some mitigating ground for his madness in for two days considering Gradiva a resurrection.